Procurement_Challenges

Wood Summit
42

Hello Patricia Thanks for your thoughts here. I completely agree that climatesmart forestry is more than carbon.

I would value understanding this from an SFI perspective. Can you paste the language from the pages you refer to or attach them to this procurement group I would like to read them but can’t find them with the link you have posted.

Sustainable Northwest works with several communities on the Oregon coast that are trying to establish community forests to protect their drinking water. Drinking watersheds have been harvest pretty significantly because of strong lumber markets and resulted in increased municipal drinking water costs related to siltation.

I would love to understand if and how SFI certification would improve outcomes for drinking water on the Oregon coastal range above what is ensured by OFPA. Can you help interpret how and where the SFI standard provides a climatesmart forestry solution via fish and non-fish stream buffers, retention, and other means associated with fog capture in the summer and soil and bank stability in the winter?

Paul

43

@pmoonen1 and @jasonegrant I really like this discussion about productivity vs. carbon storage and how we think about it. To put it another way is it better to:

  • touch 100 acres lightly
  • touch 10 acres intensively

On one hand, a light touch that preserves the forests ability to provide ecosystem services (beyond just timber output) seems desirable. But on the other hand, if you have to build roads to that larger land base (which have negative impacts on the ecosystem, and possibly soil carbon), that is a factor to consider. Market leakage due to less productive forestry can be addressed in a variety of ways in the wood LCA when we consider the forest. Likely the best approach is somewhere in between the two strawman extremes I listed. The idea of less-productive forestry also calls into the question of what’s the market demand vs. utilization of the current landscape? If we harvested less intensely, is there even enough timberland to do that? Would it take opening up some public land? Or, as peter mentioned, can we stop cutting down trees to provide single use tissues and use it for more long term wood products. Would that allow us to balance a less-intensive forestry model with future demand? This is a critical question as the longer rotation length idea, which is more productive and carbon-storing, has financial hurdles to overcome around net present value and cash flow.

44

I am interested in the Dovetail Partners report conclusion:
As a result, the past decade has seen steady growth of private and public sector alternative approaches manifested within supply chains, technology innovations, and government policies. To some degree, each of these developments pose a threat to the future of forest certification. However, this growing interest and innovation also presents the opportunity to revisit the original questions and recommit to identifying collaborative ways of securing the future of forests and forest products.

Patricia, do you know what the alternative approaches that have manifested within supply chains, technologies, and policies have been?

They would be valuable to our conversation and I am not sure that I have seen much success for the creation of alternatives. I have seen the opposite in terms of alternatives being a threat to certifications. I have seen projects being open to alternatives. Folks going out and try alternatives and finding that the alternatives show that while certification is not easy for landowners and fabricators it is way easier for projects and specifiers. Trying alternatives seems to illuminate how much easier it is to stick with a comparatively simple certified wood procurement requirement.

I push on the assumption shared by Dovetail with the hopes that there have been more successes than I am aware of and learning more about what they have been. Please let me know if folks have stories and strategies to share.

Paul

45

Hi Jacob

I would like to highlight that the wood that is used to make paper is likely not the same grade timber as what is sorted and sold for mass timber and longer life solid wood markets.

If we want single use paper to go away we need to find ways to solve single use needs via non-paper options and need to find products to use in markets we have a role in that use low grade timber that can be stabilized in the finished product for long periods of time.

Are there products you’ve seen in ZGF’s work that utilize the same fiber that is now going to pulp markets? I see that question helping to build markets for grade material that is now being used for single use. The closest thing I have seen to this is the small diameter utilization equipment being installed at mills like Vaagen Timbers. I think they can use timber with as small as a 3 or 4" top.

Paul

46

Single use Tissues - Well I used to work for a company called Scott Paper Company (most of that now belongs to Kimberly Clark) and they made tissues. I learned a few things: One most of the tissue industry today and even 25 years ago, used a tremendous amount of recycled paper, especially office papers, to make their products. Two, I was able to calculate, based on our internal numbers, that a 10 inch diameter breast height (DBH) tree can produce enough Scott Toilet Tissue for a family of 4 for 10 years. And third the paper industry recycles a lot of paper. The U.S. Paper Recovery for Recycling Rate Reached a Record 68.1 Percent in 2018 and they have a goal of 70% that they hope to hit soon. That means that of the total amount of paper we use, they recovery and recycle 2/3 of it. And that is really amazing! Tissue papers really don’t use much fiber at all.

And you are correct, the fiber in papers usually comes from thinning our teen age stands so that the consistently occupy a site with stems until they need thinning (taking up lots of CO2 in the process) and when we harvest larger trees we take the tops of the trees (let’s say where the diameter of the log gets to 6 inches and we go as high about to where the diameter gets to 2") and that part of the log will go to a pulp mill while the larger section of the log will go to a sawmill, veneer mill or a pole mill. One tree equals many products. One forest can be harvested several times to optimize CO2. Growth is equal to the amount of CO2 and H2O available but it all depends on light hitting the leaves and needles. For a tree if you don’t grow fast and get light you die and rot or become fuel for a raging wildfire in a La Nina climate cycle event. Sorry you got me started, but I really love the dynamics of how forests grow and what happens to them and everything that lives them. And I love the wonderful, natural products that they produce or that we produce from them.

47

What is a long rotation length to you Jacob? That will vary depending on where you are and the quality of the site. For loblolly pine, most will not live very long compared to a sequoia. 150 years maybe for the few that avoided pests, diseases, fire, urbanization or farming in the past 150 years. And believe me we have very few that old but you can see some in really hard to get to sites like the Congaree National Park. For Douglas-fir while your area’s European influenced history is a lot newer than ours here on the east coast, there is a huge history of massive fires and other disturbances that on many sites kept Douglas-fir probably from reaching much over that age as natural succession would dictate that more tolerant species would beat them out. Succession, and man-made or natural disturbances really limit the age that most people believe trees should live to be.

48

Hi Patricia

I think in most cases longer rotation length is more than 35-50 years for most species with the exception of species that are early successional pioneer species like alder. I have seen projects name 60+ years for DF for example.

Paul

49

So that is equal to 25-30 in southern pines!
Pat

PATRICIA LAYTON CLEMSON UNIVERSITY

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Wood Utilization + Design Institute
321 Harris Smith Building
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50

I cannot paste the language. But let me put some things together. One thing I can say is that in SFI you must meet all state standards, laws, regulations including the voluntary ones. So if you are SFI in Oregon you must meet or exceed OFPA.

51

@playton Thanks for all the feedback, let me make sure I understand your point. You’re not saying that harvest lengths don’t affect carbon, just that it varies depending on species/site class? Seems like there’s an average age for production forestry (40ish years for DF), and an idea of what an extended length might be (60+ as paul mentions). Studies have quantified just how much this can affect carbon stocks. Its interesting to think of how this differs for other trees and species that get used for mass timber, although DF is the most common out here. Understanding this dynamic for southern yellow pine also seems to be relevant from a species standpoint and use for mass timber in the SE. I suppose I’m trying to understand what kind of stance we can take - i.e. if this is generally true but there are exceptions, or this isn’t something we should even view as “climate smart forestry.”

52

This paper, which is from a couple years ago, was just shared with me and is germane to this discussion. Specifically, it suggests:

“Forest carbon storage can become more effective in climate mitigation through reduction in harvest, longer rotations, or more efficient wood product usage.”

https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/ab28bb

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53

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I have included in this piece some things to consider when looking for climate smart forestry. These are a series of questions that may be yes or no or they may have multiple issues that need to be addressed in what they report about their forests. Given this I am not setting up numbers to meet like a specific rotation age but I am suggesting how you get the effect while realizing the differences of forests across regions, soil types, ownership types and other variables. If the owner does this things we will get to where we need to be. Certification systems include a lot of these items and many more issues that are involved in a “certified well managed forests”

A large majority of our wood that goes into mass timber is coming from larger forest landowners who have multiple stands that might be harvested. With that said, I think about managing the forest as a whole such that when a stand is ready for a thinning or a harvest, the owner would have this in place for their overall landholding. After all, if I harvest a 40 acre stand, I may own 500 more acres that are continuing, and in fact, growing fast enough that they can sequester carbon at an increased rate to capture what my 40 acres may not be capturing until the trees on the 40 acres get established. That means my whole 500 acres acts a “giant carbon sequestration machine” while I produce products that move into buildings and other products to hold carbon (wood structures) or to substitute for fossil based products that produce so much carbon without actively sequestering current atmospheric carbon.

54

Hi All

Re: Rotation ages.

Rotation ages varies with forest growth capacity. On a poor or slow-growing site (ie northern forests) we may have a rotation age of 120 years. ON the coast, we may do a spacing at year 20, a commercial thinning at year 40 and a final harvest at year 100, depending on when the crown closes and the growth rates slow down dramatically.

It makes no sense to harvest early unless there is an economic incentive to do so — by increasing growth of remaining trees while using the spaced / thinned products for fibre, chips, lumber.

Longer stands may produce finer grained wood, which is often more valuable, but that added value has to be juxtaposed agains market values as we go along. For example, are two 60 year old trees more valuable for lumber at than one larger 120 year log. The easy answer is — ‘It depends’.

Likewise, since trees slow down growth rates (even if the forest has higher capacity ) one has to look at volume accumulation. Do five 100-year old trees have as much wood/value as one 500 year-old tree? From a volume perspective — no. From a value perspective — That depends.

And the factors in that ‘what depend’ response include — current market conditions, value of stored carbon in the forest or built environment, value of potential products (lumber or furniture), and a whole other list.

And before anyone raises the question of the value of Old Growth wood (and my favourites are OG Yellow Cypress and Douglas fir which I collect for ‘future’ projects to be determined, much to my wife’s chagrin), the big trees are not typically cut down and converted to conventional lumber products. They are greed in the mill and sorted for clear and VG. The clear, fine grain is certainly worth more. However, a good chunk of those trees does get used for lumber, including lam stock, but the outer clear boards are sold for higher value.

One other thing about Old Growth — it is often NOT the best structural wood. It is entirely based on physical properties. (I know, I know — not what you expected to hear, but I am happy to have a phone chat with why that is often the case.)

Peter

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55

For me, this very interesting and sophisticated discussion, but it points to the impracticality of trying to solve the challenge of climate-smart wood procurement by requiring people on the demand side – architects and their clients – to make assessments of forest practices that most are not equipped or inclined to do. If they want to take it on, that’s fine, and I think it would be useful to put together some resources to facilitate that assessment, as Pat and Jacob have started to do. This could be one of our Solutions, along with another one that’s been suggested: a comparison of the relative ‘climate-smartness’ of regulations in different jurisdictions across N. America, for which Pat also pointed to a resource, but more would be needed.

But I think that one of our Solutions clearly needs to be guidance for climate-smart wood procurement that is as straightforward and user-friendly as possible, which I think is what Scott is aiming for in his document and is what I also am trying to get at in my suggested Menu. I hope we will spend more time on this once we are ready to lift our heads up from the weeds of forest management.

Another Solution could be to get some academics to set up a framework of climate-smart forestry indicators that could be used to assess the different forest certification systems. This paper has made a start at a definition and indicators:

What is Climate-Smart Forestry? A definition from a multinational collaborative process focused on mountain regions of Europe What is Climate-Smart Forestry? A definition from a multinational collaborative process focused on mountain regions of Europe - ScienceDirect

And the recent Yale study, whose summary results are here, ran a comparison of the systems that could be replicated with an emphasis on ‘climate-smartness.’

Finally, there are a number of important challenges to climate-smart wood procurement that haven’t yet been discussed, including how building professionals who want to support climate-smart forestry through procurement can convince the check-writers to pay more for climate-smart wood? I think it would be helpful for us to flesh out some other major challenges, and see if we can come up with Solutions for them. To fulfill our charge as a Working Group, we then need to try to prioritize our Solutions in terms of sequencing (does this need to happen before that can happen?) and importance/impact.

56

I like the definition of climate smart forestry which covers much of what I put in my table. I will point out that the authors did this specific to mountain forests in Europe so the specifics may not be right for North America. Your Yale study that you cited is also interesting. SFI certainly began in industry after many, including myself while I worked at Scott Paper, found FSC unworkable in the contest of Scott operations of our business and our forests. And we did evaluate FSE, I even began sending comments to FSC even before the meeting in Canada when it was just a little organization in Europe.

SFI left AF&PA many years ago and has grown and developed overtime just as FSC – that is what standards do and of course some of those changes meant working within the international PEFC system so that SFI has international accreditation. The article (not sure how old it is) used the SFI standards that existed 10 years ago, did it do the same for FSC? If so we should look at how forest certification has evolved because it is a rapid evolving arena.

The current SFI standard has changed a lot from the one in the article, here is a discussion of the changes. SFI is currently working on a new version of the standard which should have Board approval this spring so the new standard should be in place this year. I think you will find the changes are quite dramatic on the new standard. The Board is not dominated by industry and has not been since the SFB left AF&PA 20 years ago. And SFI Inc began in 2007. I will point out that when SFI was developed every member in AF&PA had to do it or they had to leave the association which was a very powerful change agent for how industrial forest operations were changed in one day by the AF&PA Board actions. Seventeen dues paying members were expelled for not complying with SFI. It really had an immediate and widespread effect across the USA.

To me it seems sort of like the effort that Architects are trying to accomplish with their 2030 challenge. Can you imagine if the AIA board voted to put a program in place that required every member of AIA to change immediately how they design buildings? Well that is what SFI under AF&PA did do. REALLY BIG DEAL!

I am a forester and I am an environmentalist. I probably care more about all of this than most of you. I train my students to operate in this manner and I will be the first to call out a bad actor. And yes there are bad actors still in this world. They get called out just like a recent operation in Russia was called out.

So I agree let’s get out the weeds and make some recommendations that make sense. But let’s not continue to argue about an acre of trees. Can we not agree that buying from certified sustainable managed forests is good and move on. The bigger issue in carbon is to not use products that are either fossil-based carbon products like concrete (limestone is the fossil carbon) or whose manufacturing process is heavily dominated by fossil-based energy. Some friends of mine won a noble prize for saying this more than 30 years ago and we still are not listening to them.

57

The Yale study was released in 2020 and compared the most recent published version of the FSC and SFI forest management standards: 2010 and 2015-2019 respectively. Both standards are currently being revised, but until they are finalized, no more up-to-date comparison will be possible.

The only other recent academic study we are aware of that compares the systems also finds significant, substantive differences between them:

Gutierrez Garzon, A. R., Bettinger, P., Siry, J., Abrams, J., Cieszewski, C., Boston, K., Mei, B., Zengin, H., & Yeşil, A. (2020). A Comparative Analysis of Five Forest Certification Programs. Forests, 11 (8), 863. https://doi.org/10.3390/f11080863

For those who are interested in nerding out on this topic, I uploaded copies of the two standards into our Shared Resources folder. If you take the time to look at them, I think the fact that they are different will be obvious – for one thing, the FSC standard is 10 times as long.

WWF has been deeply involved in forest certification since the beginning. We have analyzed and commented on every version of the SFI standard that has been released in the last decade+, including the current one under revision. We have a representative on the board of FSC US who is currently up to her elbows in the FSC FM standard revision. We have visited many forests certified under both systems. We believe there are important differences between them and that overall FSC is the more rigorous. We are open to any credible evidence that suggests otherwise – if you have any, please share.

If the goal is to promote climate-smarter forestry, then we believe we should elevate the system whose standards are higher in regard to its attributes. This does not mean ignoring or discounting the other, but if we are aiming for 10, and one system is at 7 while the other is at 5, then it makes no sense to us to treat them as equivalent.

All this said, I hope that we can avoid an ongoing and unproductive debate about forest certification. Through long experience, I know this can easily suck all of the oxygen out of the room. In this case, it could prevent us from focusing on the many dimensions of climate-smart wood procurement on which we agree and can make progress if only we focus our time and energy there.

1 Like
58

P.S. I made a start at a Challenges/Solutions table here:

59

I like the yes/no approach.

For robust ecological forest management criteria here are nine condensed from the Ecological Forest Management book written by Jerry Franklin, Norm Johnson, and Debbie Johnson

Table A

Ecological Forestry Criteria Not Ecological Focused Silviculture Comparison
1) Multi-age: Ecological forestry utilizes multi-or uneven-aged management regimes Utilizes even-aged management regimes on high-productivity sites and selection (high-grading) on low-productivity sites
2) Native species: focuses on native species and genotypes that provide an array of ecological and other values Focuses on fast-growing species with desirable financial characteristics, often with tree improvement and genetic engineering
3) Landscape planning: stand-level treatments focus on maintenance of ecosystem processes and structures across the landscape context Landscape context of stand-level treatments focuses on efficiency of harvest patch, road, and logging design
4) Harvest rotation: utilizes rotation lengths or periodic partial cutting entries that allow expression of forest complexity Utilizes financially determined rotations on high-productivity sites and opportunistic removals on low-productivity sites
5) Retention: utilizes variable-retention regeneration harvesting practices Utilizes clearcut regeneration harvesting practices on high-production sites
6) Complexity: emphasizes complexity in thinning and, consequently, on modifying understory and midstory conditions as well as overstory conditions to restore natural condition.

Retains defective tress and structures (e.g., snahs, logs, cavities, and brooms) and may create additional such features during treatments.
Values complexity and heterogeneity.|Emphasizes contribution of thinning to financial return and consequently, on concentrating growing stock on the most efficient growth engines.

Eliminates defective trees and structures and does not create more.

Values simplicity and homogeneity.|
|7) Risk management: emphasizes ecosystem diversity and resilience to reduce risks from major ecosystem disruptions|Emphasizes fast-growing species on short rotations to reduce financial risks|
|8) Diverse successional stages: Seeks to maintain an array of ecosystem conditions (e.g., successional stages) at larger spatial scales, including older trees and forest and early successional ecosystems|Seeks to maintain age variants of single successional stage (young forests) at larger spatial scales; does not include older trees and forest or early successional ecosystems as management goals|
|9) Natural disturbance: Considers and incorporates impacts of natural disturbances|Attempts to eliminate or avoid potential for natural disturbances|

60

What is the GOAL?

I have been considering who the goal of our Leadership Meeting is about.
I went back to the 2030 Architecture Goal and found this:
Architecture 2030’s mission is to rapidly transform the global built environment from the major contributor of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions to a central part of the solution to the climate crisis.

Architecture 2030 pursues two primary objectives:

  • to achieve a dramatic reduction in the energy consumption and greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions of the built environment; and,
  • to advance the development of sustainable, resilient, equitable, and carbon-neutral buildings and communities.

I like these goals and I support them. To me they mean that in less than 10 years, the majority of buildings that are being built today from today’s fossil based systems will be fundamentally changed. They will need to be built from something that is produced by a material that is “made” from Carbon Dioxide that is in atmospheric circulation now or the recent past and not not geologically old formations. We will need to manufacture and transport these materials with the least amount of fossil fuels available and build in the same manner.

Finally we will need to build and operate these buildings to be extremely energy efficient and/or to use renewable, non-fossil energy to the maximum possible.

In the US (not sure about Canada) wood is used in about 90+% of residential buildings and we are making significant progress with building modern homes that are very energy efficient. However, our commercial and multifamily buildings are not that way. We build about 17,000 buildings a year with fossil-based building materials or materials that use significant amounts of fossil energy in their manufacturing which could be built from wood, today.

A few key things we need to do:
Build resilient, long lived buildings that can easily be renovated for new uses in the future from wood. (The Old post and beam wood buildings are being used in many ways today)

Use offsite manufacturing as much as possible to increase the efficiency and reduce waste and use less fossil fuel during construction.

Given that, if we want developers, owners, etc. to ask for wood buildings and architects to design with wood, how can we make this easy for the design/engineer/build community to more easily choose and make an impact on carbon reduction/sequestration. We may even think about adding trees to the parking lot.

How do we do that:

  1. Specify wood products that are in the supply chain from certified forests or national forests (not sure anyone is tracking this but that probably needs to be added) given the issues of fire and other things.

  2. Help architects not specify things that are bad, for example, on a recent building here, the architect specified western red cedar which comes from across the continent and will be eaten up within 5 years by carpenter bees. We got that changed to use either white oak or baldcypress which are locally grown and equal resistant to moisture and decay and not damaged by carpenter bees.

  3. If you are in a specific region, think about buying from producers in that region for mass timber. If you are using commodity glulam that may come from a distribution center, you will get what they have in stock so how do you specify that you want a specific product from a specific producer. Not sure on that one so we may need to think about that supply chain issue.

Again from my point of view, how do we rapidly change the way buildings are constructed from steel and concrete only to either wood or wood hybrid buildings to reduce fossil-based CO2 emissions. Anything we do to add significant costs to forest management or wood, and reduces the amount of forests available to use to less than a fraction of what is already certified in the US, especially for mass timber buildings, will detract from the main goals of making our world climate smart.

61

Pat, this Summit is not just about promoting and advancing mass timber construction. At the highest level, it’s about balancing wood production/use with forest conservation and restoration. If you haven’t done so, please read the draft Vision statement which lays all this out. If you disagree with parts of the statement, which I expect you will, then you are invited to suggest what you regard as improvements. The process by which comments will be handled is described in the preamble to the statement. We will also discuss the Vision as a Working Group in due course with the goal of reaching consensus as much as possible so that we can try to limit the number of individual comments so as to make things more manageable.