| | Family Forests, Climate Change, and Carbon Sequestration
Carefully managed working forests can help to abate climate change by sequestering carbon and providing forest-based energy that is less carbon intensive than comparable fossil fuel systems.
At the same time, forests will be seriously affected by climate change, seeing impacts that will range from rapidly shifting distribution of key forest types across the landscape to new threats from invasive species, pests, and pathogens. Forest resources that Americans rely on such as drinking water supply protection, forest products, wildlife habitat, and recreation access will all be threatened by these transitions.
At the same time climate impacts increase, the capacity of our forests will also be increasingly affected by subdivision and development. The U.S. Forest Service projects that 44.2 million acres (over 11 percent) of private forest across the United States will experience substantial increases in housing density by 2030. Once density exceeds 64 housing units per square mile, forests are less likely to provide ecosystem services (Stein et al. 2005).
To assure that forests can overcome these growing threats and still meet America’s needs for natural resource protection and climate change abatement, AFF asserts that forest stewardship and conservation must be strongly included in any federal climate change legislation and that forest-based energy resources should be utilized when consistent with broader stewardship and conservation objectives.
Further, forest landowners and forestry agencies at the state and federal level will be key actors in implementing a forest-climate strategy. Any new programs, funding, or other tools should be structured in ways that make them accessible and effective for these entities to achieve their objectives while ensuring net greenhouse gas reductions.
AFF is working with a diverse group of partners to advance climate options that will allow for family forest owners to make meaningful contributions to carbon offset efforts. AFF will initiate regional carbon offset aggregation pilot projects in 2008.
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