Good information, Michael – thank you. The State of America’s Forests is a good resource.
Your answer to Jason’s question was helpful. Between the knowledge hub and other incoming information, we have probably reached a state of cognitive overload. Bottom line when you are parsing information regarding private working forests vs. other types of forests is that how private working forests are managed is highly contextual, and it varies across individual based on a variety of factors, including location, forest type, scale, ownership objectives, level of sophistication, available resources, and dozens of other things.
So, to put a bit of a simpler frame on things and to (hopefully) distill a key question for our discussion, here is a way to look at private working forests:
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Private working forests produce 90% of the wood fiber for mills. Mills do not source significantly from federal land in the U.S., because it is too difficult and too uncertain. They also don’t source from non-working forests, whether public or private.
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The percentage of wood and fiber for mills coming from private working forests compared to other forests is more likely to increase rather than decrease over time.
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Harvests on private working forests occur on approximately 2% of the land base annually, and these acres are reforested. Softwood (conifer) trees grow fast on private working forests, because they are managed to receive ample access to water, sunlight and soil nutrients, which also makes them healthier and more resistant to insects, disease and severe wildfire.
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The annual carbon balance on private working forests remains stable or increasing in every region. Annually private working forests grow 43% more wood than is harvested and account for 73% of the net carbon sequestration in our nation’s forests. In a world seeking carbon negative solutions, they are already carbon negative.
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Given that our path to wood in the built environment depends on private working forests, and a central premise in the preamble of the vision statement is that “it is critical that we move as fast and far as possible to reduce embodied carbon, creating buildings whose net carbon footprint is neutral or even negative,” then it seems reasonable that one of the most important questions we can answer is “how can we best engage private working forests to produce both the wood and carbon benefits we seek in the built environment?”
I am confident that the following simple principles will effectively engage private working forests in finding solutions in the built environment: