Sustainable forest management and climate change

What would the 1980s have been without big hair, wine coolers and the discovery that the earth’s atmosphere had a hole in it over Antarctica. This blanket of ozone blocks most of the sun’s high-frequency ultraviolet rays. This discovery set the stage for the Montreal Protocol in 1987.

Today, the hole in the ozone is headed for a happy ending. Due to global mitigation measures, the hole is actually shrinking. Now however, some scientists say the environmental triumph of recovering the ozone layer could have a troubling side effect — boosting global warming, at least in the Antarctic region.

Ozone itself is a greenhouse gas. A thinner ozone layer not only reduced heat trapped over the region, it helped stir circumpolar winds, which in turn created sea spray that formed reflective, cooling clouds.

Jonathan Shanklin, one of the British scientists that discovered the hole in the ozone, recently said, “It’s very difficult to quantify the impact on a global scale, but I think the evidence suggests filling the hole will have a regional effect on the Antarctic, possibly leading to more warming for the bulk of the Antarctic. That could drastically change predictions about global sea level change.”

Recently, an international panel of scientists suggested, with near certainty, that human activity is the cause of most of the temperature increases of recent decades, and warns that sea levels could conceivably rise by more than three feet by the end of the century, if greenhouse gas emissions continue at a runaway pace.

On the other hand, Greenpeace co-founder, Dr. Patrick Moore, claims that man-made climate change is just a bunch of hot air, as it were. In his Capitol Hill testimony responding to the United Nations Panel on Climate Change, Dr. Moore — who earned a Ph.D. in ecology — insisted that “There is no scientific proof that human emissions of carbon dioxide are the dominant cause of the minor warming of the Earth’s atmosphere over the past 100 years … no actual proof, as it is understood in science, actually exists.”

No wonder the average person is so confused by the climate change debate. These mixed messages however, have not curbed the enthusiasm of those that would put more restrictions on emissions and emitters as the way to reduce carbon dioxide emissions.

The president’s June 2013 Climate Change speech and Action Plan identified climate change as a high priority for the remainder of his presidency. Unfortunately, what was missing from the plan is the role of sustainable forest management in sequestrating atmospheric carbon.

No matter which side of the debate you’re on, sustainable forest management and carbon storage in wood products are significant countermeasures to greenhouse gas emissions. Forests are carbon sinks, as a result of natural processes such as growth, and human activities such as harvesting and afforestation.

Harvested areas regenerate. In any year, there is substantial new carbon sequestration occurring on the areas previously harvested. The idea behind using forests to help mitigate climate change involves managing to reduce their potential to be a net carbon emitter (as in the case of wildfire) and increase their potential to sequester or store carbon.

The amount of carbon released into the atmosphere from harvesting is small compared with the amount released due to forest fires and other disturbances such insects and disease.

As well, much of the carbon removed from the forest is stored in durable wood commodities, pulp and paper and other value added products. Wood-based construction is generally considered to be an environmentally sound alternative to steel, aluminum and concrete.

Another example is bioenergy produced from wood waste or other forest sources. It provides an alternative to fossil fuel. Biofuels are renewable resources that can be replenished as new forests grow. Recycling harvested wood and using waste wood for bioenergy are also important steps.

Forests absorb about one-quarter of the carbon emitted by human activities, such as the burning of fossil fuels and the changing of land uses. Forest carbon uptake reduces the rate at which carbon accumulates in the atmosphere. How well forests will continue to remove the proportion of carbon now being emitted by direct or indirect human activities will affect the future rate of atmospheric carbon.

While experts engage in the climate change debate, one thing is certain, forests and the products they produce, will continue to remove and store carbon, as they have for centuries. Recognizing the importance of sustainable forest management is up to our state and national leaders.

Julia Altemus is the executive vice president of the Montana Wood Products Association.