California's historic AB32 legislation put the state in a leadership role in the effort to combat climate change.
Now, in many ways, the hard work begins.
California is reviewing its initial greenhouse gas-measuring protocols, which were established by the California Climate Action Registry and were intended to encourage businesses to take steps toward the state's overall reduction of greenhouse gases.
The state's natural landscapes and working forests play a unique role in this effort, largely due to their enormous productive potential.
Forests alone cover more than 33 million acres of land and stand ready to remove carbon from the atmosphere as part of the natural tree-growth process. While most industries focus on reducing emissions, forestry companies can offer ways to capture and store gases.
The initial protocols, unfortunately, are not providing the incentives for landowners who manage forestland sustainably - which includes harvesting trees to provide essential wood products and replanting to regenerate forests while conserving water quality and a wide range of forest resources - to participate in the state's voluntary registry. Instead, the protocols reward owners of unmanaged forestland and encourage owners to forgo beneficial forest management now and in the future. Consequently, private forestland owners are not lining up to participate in the state's voluntary registry.
How did this happen?
These protocols are largely based on international ecological priorities written for areas where the challenges of deforestation are greater and conservation practices are weaker.
They thrive in a simplified world where the landscape is either green or brown - planted or deforested, and where a layperson can judge whether a carbon offset project satisfies the principle of "additionality;" that is, whether it resulted in net emission reductions compared to what would have happened under a business-as-usual scenario. In those situations, a simplistic mechanism that rewards planting and protecting whole new forests can be appropriate.
Also, these protocols reward permanent protection of forests in a system of reserves. On the surface, forest protection appears to offer tangible results, but the method backfires as deferred harvesting causes forest growth to slow or stop, or causes the forest to succumb to wildfire or some other catastrophe.
In California, with our abundant forestland, the questions should be different: How do we use forestland to do the most for the environment? And how do we keep productive forests under forestland use?
Any benefit calculation should look beyond the forest to include the entire life cycle of wood, including the storage of carbon in forest products-in-use, storage after product use, and substitution of wood products for fossil fuel and more energy-intensive product alternatives.
Harvested wood, for example, stores carbon for long periods, depending on the actual product, and helps California meet its wood product needs locally, rather than importing from other states and countries and facing the negative environmental impacts from transporting that wood.
Wood also has the added benefit of being a renewable resource, without requiring large amounts of fossil fuels in its production.
As California moves to the next step in its groundbreaking work on climate change, it needs to identify measurements for forestry that will encourage net absorption of greenhouse gases and do so in a way that encourages landowners to participate.
Some key attributes that California policymakers should consider include flexibility, compensation to landowners to maximize carbon absorption and creating efficient methods for estimating carbon stocks.
Today, California's forest practices regulations are among the most stringent environmental requirements in the world.
Forestry companies subject to these rules are well poised to be major contributors to the state's effort to reduce greenhouse gases. Properly implemented, carbon offsets achieved through active forest management can provide a valuable outlet for businesses, individuals and governments.
But without a thoughtful, well-rounded system that considers the totality of what the forest sector offers, California could leave its greatest resource for absorbing gases on the sidelines.
Steve Mader is senior habitat management and planning scientist at CH2M HILL, Inc., where he has been specializing in forest, riparian and wetland ecology for 26 years. His work is contributing to the development of forestry best management practices in California, Oregon, Washington and Idaho.San Francisco Chronicle
