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Forest Journalism for a Sustainable Future

Big trees, tall buildings: How forests can help solve global warming through carbon storage

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The capture and storage of carbon through natural processes in the soil, wetlands, forests and wood products –- followed by its monetization –- began more than 20 years ago. (Photo: National Park Service)

Editor’s Note: In a three-part series starting today, Treesource will explore the potential roles of forests and wood products in addressing the global climate crisis. 

Part 1: How can we use more wood, a renewable, biodegradable carbon sink, while also storing more carbon in forests across the U.S. and the world? 

Part 2: A detailed look at the policy choices that governments, businesses and individuals must make. 

Part 3: A look ahead to 2050. What could a more sustainable society look like, if forests and wood products were utilized in new ways?

In 2018, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change issued a warning that one United Nations official called “a deafening, piercing smoke alarm going off in the kitchen.” For the world to avoid ecological and social catastrophe, the scientists said, humans must quickly and radically transform the systems that provide energy –- by ceasing to burn fossil fuels. Greenhouse gas emissions, they said, must drop by half no later than 2030, and to zero by 2050.

Three years later, in August 2021, the IPCC returned with what the UN’s secretary general labeled “a code red for humanity.” The wildfires, droughts, hurricanes and brutal cold snaps of recent years were evidence that so much carbon dioxide is already cooking the atmosphere that further calamities are inevitable.

And yet, the significant curtailment so urgently needed has not happened. Instead, greenhouse gas emissions actually increased between 2018 and 2021, the IPCC said.

Action is needed.

Now.

On many fronts.

[Read more…]

Fighting fire with finance: Unique financing approach can restore ailing forests

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Forests provide many different services to people, most of which we don’t pay for and therefore tend not to be aware of or to take them for granted.

Wildfires burning in important municipal and farm irrigation watersheds have awakened many to the true cost of unhealthy forests, when tens of millions of dollars must be invested to filter the water that nature previously filtered for us, rehabilitate a watershed to stabilize the soil, and clear sediment from reservoirs that filled after a wildfire.

This TedX presentation by Leigh Madeira demonstrates how using financial markets and private investment, water districts, cities and other entities can accelerate the restoration of watersheds after 100 years of fire suppression has created overly dense forests. [Read more…]

Can biotechnology save the American chestnut from extinction?

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Spiny burs enclose chestnuts in Syracuse, New York. (Photo: Andrew Newhouse/SUNY)

SYRACUSE — American chestnuts used to be unique and beautiful trees, providing sustenance and shelter for wildlife and a healthy and profitable nut crop for humans. These trees were huge, majestic and very long-lived compared to other species in America’s eastern forests. But tragically, American chestnuts were almost entirely wiped out when an invasive blight fungus was accidentally introduced to the United States in the late 1800s. Without human intervention, populations of pure American chestnut will likely continue to decline until they are all but gone.

However, there are relatives of the American chestnut that evolved with the blight fungus in Asia; they usually tolerate blight infections without much damage. There have been multiple efforts to breed American with Chinese chestnuts to get desirable characteristics from both species, but traditional breeding is a slow and unpredictable process that is limited by undesirable traits from Chinese chestnut that make them less suited to competing in eastern U.S. forests.

The American Chestnut Foundation’s backcross breeding program shows promise in producing trees with American chestnut growth traits, but since blight resistance in Chinese chestnuts is controlled by several genes, inheritance by future generations of chestnuts is inconsistent (think hair color in humans: a child’s hair isn’t always the same color as either parent, but there are general trends that are somewhat predictable). Recent technological advances in genomic screening are improving this process, but it will still probably require multiple generations of breeding, and blight resistance in backcrossed offspring will likely never equal that of the Chinese chestnut ancestor.

At the College of Environmental Science and Forestry (ESF) here in Syracuse, our research team is trying a different approach. We’re using the tools of biotechnology to produce fully American chestnut trees that successfully tolerate blight infections, protecting the tree without even harming the blight fungus itself. What we did was copy a single gene from wheat — though the same gene is found in many other plants like corn and bananas, and there are no similarities to gluten or other allergens — and transferred it into American chestnuts. This enzyme breaks down a toxin called oxalic acid, which is produced by the fungus and kills American chestnut tissues. [Read more…]

Wildfire mitigation: California Senate approves forest management changes

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Thomas Fire, Ventura, CA, Los Padres NF, 2017
Firefighters watch the approach of last fall’s Thomas Fire in Ventura, California, Los Padres National Forest. Photo: U.S. Forest Service

In the midst of a string of catastrophic wildfires, the California Senate sent a bill to Governor Jerry Brown’s desk Friday that makes sweeping changes to forest management and wildfire prevention while addressing the role utility companies play in the devastation.

Senate Bill 901 aims to strike a balance between ratepayers and utilities, using a new set of rules to determine how much of the cost of repaying wildfire losses utilities can pass on to consumers. When not at fault, utilities will be allowed to finance the debt, thereby reducing how much is passed on to the end consumer and preventing forced bankruptcy. But the bill also doubles penalties for utilities found to be at fault for causing fires.

The California Department of Forestry and Fire determined in June that downed power lines and other maintenance issues on equipment belonging to investor-owned utility Pacific Gas & Electric caused over a dozen such fires. [Read more…]

All things to all people? Competing interests complicate forest management

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“Forest ecosystems are complex, more complex than we can think.”

The late Jack Ward Thomas, a research wildlife biologist and former chief of the U.S. Forest Service, often recited this line in speeches he gave.

He was only referring to ecosystems.

Throw in economics and social wants and desires, and the equation becomes significantly more complicated.

All forests can’t be all things at all times in all places. You can’t have an old-growth and a young forest at the same time. A forest can’t maximize carbon storage and reduce the wildfire risk at the same time. [Read more…]