The Foibles of Forestry
A Forge the Future feature
Hello again. It's been a few weeks, so I thought it time for another bonus post, this time on forestry. This is part of my continued efforts to add a little extra to the newsletter from time to time, as well as to experiment with longer form factors that don't fit into the normal weekly format. I was originally going to keep them to subscribers only, but for now I'm going to continue sending them out to everyone. If they're not your thing, that's fine, the weekly newsletter will continue as always, but if you like this sort of longer-form content, then consider subscribing! Otherwise, liking and sharing this content is also incredibly useful, to help spread the word - Thanks!
Forestry comes up in conversations about climate change pretty often. Recently, it's been in the form of initiatives like the Trillion Trees Initiative (recently endorsed by Trump), but is also associated heavily with carbon offsetting and carbon negative programs, as well as ecosystem management, the timber industry, and more. It's also very relatable - while the scope climate change is often intimidating, and the complexity of some solutions hard to grasp, we all understand trees. They're green, good for the environment, and make us feel good.
Trees are a politically easy solution, that avoids the main problem of climate change - people like trees, they make good headlines, and more importantly, you can plant them without putting in carbon taxes, cap-and-trade systems, or emissions laws, or any of the many other policy instruments needed to incentivise large scale decarbonisation. (see the recent Republican push for climate-change issues). However, when you look a little closer, trees are far from the simple solution that they initially appear. While they make great publicity, they need planting correctly, and managing in the longer term - see the recent Turkish tree debacle. Even leaving aside attention-grabbing tree planting stunts, trees and forestry are a complex and involved part of the carbon cycle.
Trees as offsets
Trees and forestry programs are often used as negative emissions/carbon offset projects. I've written about offsets before, and the whole topic is contentious - arguably we need negative carbon solutions to have a chance of hitting net zero in a sensible timeline (and to give a chance to decarbonise industries with no easy solutions and long timelines, like aviation, concrete, and steel). However detractors argue (with good reason) that offsets are a licence to pollute - to take the argument to the extreme, they are colonialism writ large - a licence for rich countries to pollute as they always have, whilst throwing a pittance to less wealthy countries to plant a few trees - the 'Do as I say, not as I do' attitude.
This is merely dealing with concept of offsetting as a whole. However, offsetting with forestry in particular brings up a whole host of other challenges. How much CO2 does a tree absorb? The answer varies massively, depending on the age of the tree, the setting, the species, the environment, and countless more factors. More and more studies are being done, but tl;dr - it's complex, very complex.
Trees also bring up other challenges - what if they're cut down? Does that then negate the emissions? Or do you count the emissions as negated, and count the cutting down as new emissions? How do you even determine how many trees are in the forest, and how big they are? Do you trust the project owner to check this, or do you use a specialist service?
There's also a problem of what you should actually pay for. Do you pay for carbon that's already sequestered into trees - doling out carbon credits after each year, based upon the change in carbon value of the trees, or or do you pay in advance? (in which case, what happens if the forest is destroyed after the credits are sold?). What about preventing cutting down forests or other carbon rich environments? Surely that is valuable - you're not only protecting trees which are absorbing CO2, but preventing the release of carbon from burning or otherwise destroying the carbon within the forest. This can lead to situations where countries can use forests as leverage for payment - give me carbon credits or I'll destroy this natural resource - which is problematic to say the least. How do you distinguish between forests that have been preserved due to carbon payments, and those that would've been left untouched anyway?
Projects also need to be sensitive to their environment. Early offset projects have suffered from a plethora of problems relating to not integrating with their environment, from planting inappropriate trees (and disrupting the local ecosystem), to removing indigenous peoples from their lands in order to create protection zones.
A related issue is land use. Trees require space - a lot of space. A recent report estimated that to sequester 150m tons of CO2 per year would require as much as 4m hectares of forest - forest that would have to remain as protected forest ad infinitum. To sequester the US' 5.8bn tons of emissions entirely with trees would require close to 155m hectares - twice the area of Texas. The planet doesn't have enough land free, especially with growing pressure on food supplies with a growing population.
Timber!
There's also the use of trees for wood. We use a lot of wood as a species, for a plethora of uses, from burning it for light and heat, using it for paper, to furniture and even buildings. Some of these uses are not ideal, and should be moved away from, but others, such as building, are perfectly reasonable uses, and should be encouraged. But how does that play into the carbon picture? The wood needs to come from somewhere, which means cutting down forests. Do you clear-cut old forests, plant new ones, or manage existing woodlands sustainably? The correct answer is likely a mix of all of them, but figuring out the benefits and drawbacks is complex, and varies in every situation.
The situation gets even more complex if we want to consider the full life-cycle of wood in the context of sequestering carbon. After all, wood that's chopped down and used in furniture or for building is arguably sequestered carbon, but should we incorporate that into carbon counting, and if so, how? How do we balance the benefits of sequestering carbon in this manner versus cutting down the trees to do it?
There's a huge market for better tree and forestry management, which has traditionally been a hard science to quantify. It has often required volunteers trekking into forests and taking hand measurements of trees, and then statistically extrapolating the data from there. However, a new breed of company is emerging that uses AI and Machine Learning to make much better guesses on the state of forests (see Pachama and 20tree, amongst others). These novel tools give us an opportunity to make much more informed decisions about how to use or preserve our precious forest resources.
One final wider point to make is that many of the issues with forestry stem from a wider problem that affects much of climate change - our current system does not place any value on things we cannot sell for money. Hence we have a situation where, for example, the wood in mangrove trees has a monetary value as firewood, but we put no price on the immense stores of carbon in mangrove roots, nor their vital role in coastal ecosystems and in securing coastlines. This is going to have to change one way or the other - without a price, monetary or otherwise, on the natural world around us, we will continue plundering our planet's resources without heed to the true cost until it's too late.
Thanks for sticking with me on this brief dive into the complex world of wood and forestry. It only touches the surface of many of the issues, and there's plenty more I simply didn't have space to mention - if I missed something important here, I can only apologise!
As always, I'd love to hear your thoughts and feedback, both on this piece, and the format as a whole - do let me know at oli@forgethefuture.com!
Oli