New York’s working forests help offset climate change

With Washington paralyzed by partisan gridlock, states are tackling climate change head-on. New York is poised to lead. But the stakes are high — if Democrats with a supermajority in a key state like New York can’t get climate policy right, comprehensive policy to address climate change at the national level is truly dead.

The state Assembly is currently considering the Climate & Community Protection Act. By indiscriminately mandating zero emissions, the CCPA will be the final nail in the coffin for what’s left of many industries upstate, including the forestry sector. Every wood products manufacturing facility will be regulated out of existence under the proposed legislation, and without markets to support them, we will kill our state’s working forests in the process.

Working forests are sustainably managed to provide a steady supply of renewable material: wood. Of the 19 million acres of forests in New York, about 75 percent are privately owned — by individuals and families, small and large businesses, and everyday Americans who invest in working forests as part of their retirement portfolios. More than 700,000 private forest landowners in rural New York depend on nearby forest product manufacturing facilities to buy their trees. Healthy markets for wood help landowners afford the considerable investments necessary to keep their forests healthy and thriving.

The CCPA would manipulate the economy to strip forest land

of its economic value, making a parking lot, wind or solar farm more valuable than a working forest. Though it sounds counterintuitive, the more wood products we use, the more protected our working forests are from conversion — what we commonly consider deforestation. Land conversion is the single biggest threat to our nation’s forests, and it happens when we value other land uses — like development — more than we value a forest. If we want forests that stay, we need forests that pay.

The environmental reality is that working forests are the most powerful carbon capture technology we have. In New York’s working forests, a never-ending cycle of growth, harvest, and regeneration keeps our forests doing exactly what we need them to do — perpetually drawing carbon from the atmosphere and storing that carbon in long-lived wood products. Nationally, forests sequester 15 to 20 percent of our emissions every year. But that sequestration only occurs if we can keep the forest there to begin with.

New York policymakers have been right to implore the federal government to act based on the conclusions of the United

Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. But as New York steps into a climate leadership role, this proposed policy blatantly ignores the IPCC’S conclusions on working forests: “In the long term, a sustainable forest management strategy aimed at maintaining or increasing forest carbon stocks, while producing an annual sustained yield of timber, fiber, or energy from the forest, will generate the largest sustained mitigation benefit.”

How did working forests end up on the wrong side of Albany’s climate policy? Modern sustainable forestry in New York is one of the “natural resources solutions” the IPCC encourages. Coming out of the gate on the wrong side of the IPCC is a huge misstep that could doom the New York approach and any others that follow suit.

When the Climate & Community Protection Act kills what’s left of sustainable forestry in New York, who will pay to manage our forests and keep them intact and healthy? If we don’t use renewable wood for homes and buildings, renewable energy, furniture and paper products, what materials will we use instead? What is the real cost of New York getting its climate policy wrong?

Bold policy is needed to align our economic and environmental concerns. This isn’t it.