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Forest Journalism for a Sustainable Future

Tufts University professor calls for expansion of U.S. forests to combat climate change

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The Earth’s forests can be a storehouse for carbon, but deforestation has the opposite effect. Photo: Shirley Atkins

Forests have been removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and storing carbon for more than 300 million years. When we cut down or burn trees and disturb forest soils, we release that stored carbon to the atmosphere. Since the start of the Industrial Revolution, one-third of all carbon dioxide emissions to the atmosphere from human activities have come from deforestation.

To slow climate change, we need to rapidly reduce global emissions from fossil fuels, biofuels, deforestation, and wetland and agricultural soils. We need to also accelerate the removal of carbon dioxide that is already in the atmosphere.

In a new report published by the nonprofit Dogwood Alliance, my co-author Danna Smith and I show that we have a major opportunity to make progress on climate change by restoring degraded U.S. forests and soils. If we reduce logging and unsustainable uses of wood, we can increase the rate at which our forests remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and ensure that it will remain stored in healthy forests. [Read more…]

With climate change comes new realities for forests, wildlife and humans

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Because of their unique color phases, snowshoe hares are particularly vulnerable to the effects of climate change. Photo: National Park Service

Editor’s note: This article is the second in a two-part series focused on forests and climate change. The first article discussed how forests interact with carbon – primarily as sources and sinks for atmospheric carbon. This article discusses just a few of the myriad ways that forest ecosystems – trees, wildlife and the ecosystem services that forests regulate – are impacted by climate change.

Scott Mills reaches across the table and grabs a salt shaker in one hand and a pepper shaker in the other. The salt represents a snowshoe hare in its winter coat, the pepper that same hare in its summer coat. He moves the shakers around the table, a bit of drama to underscore his point.

Mills, a wildlife biology professor at the University of Montana has studied snowshoe hares and climate change for the past two decades and finds the intersection of if and how animals can adapt to our changing climate “totally fascinating.” [Read more…]

Forest management, climate change blamed as wildfires ravage southern Europe

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Wildfires threatened resort towns and islands on France’s Mediterranean coast in late July. Photo: Matt Fidler via Facebook.

Wildfires are personal. They threaten your home, your favorite campsite, maybe even your entire city.

So it’s easy not to look up during the onslaught of fire and smoke to see that you are not alone in confronting what one western Montana firefighter recently called “the beast.”

But 2017’s ferocious wildfire season is, in fact, a global phenomenon playing out from the American West to Portugal, Spain, France and Greece. [Read more…]

Study: Wildfires emit 3 times the fine particulate previously thought

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The study also showed that prescribed burns produce far less smoke per unit area burned than do wildfires. Photo: USFS/Rice Ridge fire/via inciweb.com

Naturally burning timber and brush launch what is called fine particulate into the air at a rate three times as high as levels noted in emissions inventories at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, according to a new study. The microscopic specks that form aerosols are a hazard to human health, particularly to the lungs and heart.

“Burning biomass produces lots of pollution. These are really bad aerosols to breathe from a health point of view,” said researcher Greg Huey from the Georgia Institute of Technology, which led the study. The research also describes other chemicals in wildfire smoke, some never before measured, and it raises the estimated annual emission of particulate matter in the western United States significantly. [Read more…]