Whither the Vision statement?

Wood Summit
5

Good points, Jason, and great stuff, Michael - a few quick reactions below.

“With the right tools we can show the spectrum of what forests, forest management and forest products do to help reduce the impacts of climate change. And it will be a spectrum.”

Yes, and/but the spectrum should include forest protection and restoration as well as management.

WRT spectrums for forest management, sharing this from a contribution to the Procurement WG:

There are many possible definitions of and classifications for climate-smart wood products. The challenge is magnified by the fact that there is no universally accepted definition of climate-smart forestry. The options for ‘virgin’ wood in this menu are founded on the following core principles:

  1. There is not a binary choice between “climate-smart” and “climate-dumb” forestry; rather, there is a spectrum from more to less climate smart.

  2. Climate-smart forestry reaches above Business As Usual (BAU) forestry that meets the minimum requirements of law. Because the regulatory baseline is uneven – the forest practice rules of some states/provinces are more stringent and climate smarter than others – this means that what is climate smart in one jurisdiction may be less so in another.

  3. Climate-smart forestry improves over BAU on at least two key dimensions:

  4. Reducing emissions and increasing stores of forest carbon (carbon stored in live and dead vegetation and in soils). The latter is known as “additionality.”

  5. Maintaining or building ecological integrity and diversity that are the bases for resistance and resilience as the climate changes.

Forest practices that result in improvements in one dimension generally produce improvements in the other, but this is not always the case.

  1. Recognizing that there is no set definition, the following practices are commonly associated with climate-smart forestry:

  2. Using extended harvest rotations;

  3. Logging selectively under uneven-age management regimes;

  4. When employing even-age management, limiting average harvest sizes and increasing live-tree retention to increase carbon storage and to ensure a diversity of sizes, ages, and native species that make up multiple forest conditions and habitats;

  5. Protecting water quality and aquatic habitats with wider buffers along streams and around wetlands than are required at the regulatory floor;

  6. Restricting the use of chemicals and prohibiting those that are particularly hazardous;

  7. Protecting high conservation value forests including but not limited to old growth, and protecting and restoring habitat for imperiled, threatened and endangered species;

  8. Restoration forestry that manages forests toward a more natural and healthy condition.

“do we start with our map so zoomed in to one spot that we don’t have the view of the full picture?”

Let’s try to look at the full picture, which again, for me, includes what we protect — where we restore — and how we manage so as to increase forest carbon stores and ecological resilience as much as possible while balancing society’s need for forest products. To my knowledge, the increase in carbon stocks in the U.S. that’s occurred in the last 30 or 40 years has not taken place so much because of conscious public policies (with the significant exception of the NW Forest Plan) or private sector efforts, but in good part because forests in the East have been growing back as family farming has died out. Given the gravity and urgency of the climate crisis, it seems to me that we need to greatly accelerate both public and private efforts to increase and accelerate a trend that’s already there.

I’m not sure what the forest carbon balance story is in Canada, but it would surprise me if it’s as good as the U.S. If we’re looking at the bigger picture, I hope it will include Canada.