How do we live in a world where humans require shelter in many forms AND balance that with what forests require? And, how do we do this differently than before?

Wood Summit
16

I agree that this:

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? ”

…is extremely important, Dave. In the CEO principles and the FACA recommendations, the emphasis is on engaging through incentives. It definitely seems like the right incentives are something that many of us could support, but I also wonder if there isn’t a role for regulation? Unless the incentives are powerful, we may not get improvements at speed and at scale.

There’s also the question of what it is exactly that we are incentivizing - are improvements in forest management on private lands needed to make forests/wood climate smart or climate smarter, and if so, what is their nature? The information you provided could be interpreted to mean that the answer is, “not really - look at how well things are going already” – or it could mean, “things are going in the right direction, but we should do everything we can to drive continued improvement.” It comes down to whether our definition of climate smart forestry is about affirming the status quo or challenging ourselves to strive well beyond Business As Usual – and if so – towards what?

That’s what the Vision is supposed to be about.

I’d invite people to check out this Jerry Franklin video that just went up on the Knowledge Hub:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=meI6hWfAR3Y

It underlines why it’s so important to be clear on the definitions of the terms we use. The term “sustainable forestry” is constantly bandied about, but in some contexts it refers to what Jerry calls production forestry, which focuses on sustaining and maximizing timber production and profits, while in others — including, of course, those I run in — it is about sustaining ecosystems and environmental benefits as well as wood yield. It’s about the “wholeness” that Franklin refers to (in an agricultural context, think permaculture vs. industrial monoculture agriculture).

A major challenge for our CWAG is to see if we can agree on a definition of climate-smart forestry (or climate-smarter forestry or climate-friendlier forestry or whatever we call it) because this is one of the cornerstones on which the Vision will be built, which in turn will determine what is possible in terms of collective action.