GOING SMALL FOR A BIG PROBLEM
Family-owned forests could help in the fight to save the planet
E VE Lonnquist’s family has owned a forest in the mountains of northwest Oregon since her grandmother bought the land in 1919. Her 95-year-old father still lives on the 157-acre property. And she and her wife often drive up from their home just outside Portland.
But lately, Lonnquist, 59 and recently retired, has been thinking about the future of her family’s land. Like many small-forest owners, they draw some income from logging and would like to keep doing so. But they would also like to see the forest, with its stands of Douglas fir, alder and cherry, protected from clear-cutting or being sold off to developers.
“For us, the property is our family’s history,” she said.
More than half of the 751 million acres of forestland in the United States are privately owned, most by people like Lonnquist, with holdings of 1,000 acres or less. These family forests, environmental groups argue, represent a large, untapped resource for combating the effects of climate change.
Conserving the trees and profiting from them might seem incompatible. But Lonnquist is hoping to do both by capitalizing on the forest’s ability to clean the air, turning the carbon stored in the forest into credits that can then be sold to polluters who want or need to offset their carbon footprints.
“Trees are the No. 1 way in which carbon can be removed from the atmosphere and stored in vegetation over the long term,” said Brian Kittler, the western regional office director for the Pinchot Institute for Conservation, which has a program in Oregon to help the owners of family forests develop potentially profitable carbon projects.
Larger forests around the world have already been enlisted as carbon storehouses, through programs like the United Nations initiative for Reducing Emissions From Deforestation and Forest Degradation, or REDD, that encourage forest conservation worldwide in exchange for credits that can be sold on the global carbon markets.
Some large timber companies, including Potlatch, have also entered the markets, reducing their logging to levels below legal limits to receive millions of dollars in credits.
But so far, small-forest owners, even conservationminded ones like Lonnquist, have not rushed to embrace market-based carbon storage. Many do not even know it exists, and those who do often find the complexities bewildering.
Some owners believe, wrongly, that to enter the carbon markets they must forgo all income from logging. And some, reluctant to forfeit the ability to quickly turn their trees into cash, have balked at signing a contract to keep a forest standing for 15 to 125 years.
Even more daunting, the expense of bringing a forest to the carbon market — a process that involves taking an inventory of the trees, assessing the forest’s carbon content, estimating future growth, and submitting to several levels of auditing — has been so high that it would eliminate any profit for most small landholders.
Environmental organizations like the Pinchot Institute and the Nature Conservancy have for years been searching for a way around these hurdles by educating landowners about the markets’ potential for generating income and finding ways to decrease the costs.
“Traditionally, your only ool to generate revenues as been periodic timber arvest,” said Josh Parish, director of the Nature Conservancy’s Working Woodlands program, which s working with the owners of rivate forests in Pennsylvaia and Tennessee. “The nice hing about carbon is essenally people are being paid to mprove forest management.” In fact, if small-forest ownrs can get past the barriers, he carbon markets can be rofitable, providing an inial flush of money and then egular yearly payments in much smaller amounts. The carbon credits from Lonnquist’s forest could ring an estimated $235,000 ver the first six years, and bout $6,000 a year after hat, said Kyle Holland, the managing director of Ecological Carbon Offset Partners, a California firm that helps small-forest owners enter the carbon markets.
Lonnquist and her family could still log on a limited basis, as long as they stuck to a plan for managing the forest and maintained a steady level of carbon storage through the forest’s continued growth.
The economic case for private owners entering the carbon markets is likely to get stronger. Forests, especially in areas like the Northwest, where trees grow tall and thick, tend to draw higher prices than many other conservation measures. And with last year’s Paris climate pact, some analysts expect carbon prices, now about $3 to $12 per ton in the United States, to rise.
Kittler said the conservation institute, which is subsidizing the preparation of Lonnquist’s forest with the help of a federal grant and has partnered with Holland’s firm for the Oregon project, hoped it would encourage more private owners to enter the markets. Lonnquist and other owners will be given a choice of selling credits on the global market or on California’s market, created under the state’s 2006 Global Warming Solutions Act.
Recent developments in forestry may help make the prospect more appealing by lowering the initial costs to landholders. Holland’s company, for example, has developed a digital tool — a smartphone equipped with a laser to measure distance and an inclinometer to measure height — that he believes will greatly reduce the expense of conducting a forest inventory, which typically costs $40,000 to $100,000 or more, depending about the amount of land.
Individual forest owners who sign up for Holland’s service pay a $75 application fee and receive the smartphone. If, after conducting an inventory, they choose to move forward with the carbon project, they pay the company $1,350 to complete the process.
Some small properties do not store enough carbon to make even that effort worthwhile. The price of carbon, Holland said, has to be $10 or more per ton “to make it pencil out” for the owner. And novel methods like Holland’s still need approval from the companies that verify forest inventories or serve as official market registries.
But Jessica Orrego, the director of forestry for the American Carbon Registry, said such advances might be the key to bringing in small forest owners.
“We’re fully supportive,” she said. “We’re advocates of innovation. We think it’s extremely important in the carbon market.”