Climate-Smart Wood Economy

For forest landowners, this project offers opportunities to:

• Connect with and learn from other landowners and benefit from new incentives for climate-smart stewardship.

• Be recognized and paid for restoring forest health, wildlife habitat, and clean air and water.

• Join a project working to quantity and verify benefits of good forest stewardship practices.

• Connect with buyers interested in climate-smart wood products.

• Gain market access or advantage for wood products with verifiable climate and forest health benefits.

Several Partners in this project are focusing our work under this grant to support tribal forest management and the inclusion of Indigenous Knowledge – including Traditional Ecological Knowledge – in all forest management. We recognize that traditional and contemporary forest management by tribes is directly tied to improved community and ecosystem health, and we are working to ensure tribal forestry is increasingly recognized and rewarded as climate-smart.

This grant supports tribal forestry and natural resource programs by:

• Spotlighting through profiles and public events tribal forestry programs that are successfully demonstrating management to support community and forest health.

• Delivering financial assistance (cost-share and incentive payments) for tribes adopting forest practices that bolster carbon sequestration and climate resilience, such as thinning and prescribed fire.

• Offering premiums for timber sales by tribes who sell climate-smart forest products.

• Providing funding and high-quality contractors to develop compelling marketing and storytelling materials (e.g., videos, web resources) about the benefits of tribal forestry activities.

• Providing technical assistance for tribes to complete forest impact assessments using remote sensing and tribal forest data.

• Connecting tribal forest and timber managers with buyers interested in climate-smart wood products from tribal forestlands.

Mills and wood product fabricators are critical partners in our efforts to improve forest health and resilience in the Pacific Northwest.

Through this project, we seek to help mills and fabricators gain recognition and value from their work with climate-smart forest managers. We will support traceability and improved reporting about where the wood comes from, enabling mills and fabricators to differentiate their products in the marketplace. We aim to tell the story of how all the players along the supply chain fit together – forest owners and loggers, mills and fabricators, and green builders.

Our project includes a rigorous approach to quantifying forest health and climate benefits in timber supply areas and combines it with an effective track-and-trace system to follow harvested timber from forests to consumers. This will enable mills and fabricators to more confidently understand and market climate-smart forest products. These climate-smart claims are designed to either exist on their own or to complement the certification programs that many mills and fabricators already participate in. Climate-smart claims can deliver improved market access, sales premiums, or other recognition in the marketplace.

Demand for climate-smart wood is growing, and this collaborative project is leading the development of credible and easy-to-use track-and-trace pathways that connect builders and buyers to forest owners and producers who are restoring and protecting the forests we rely on.

Many rural jobs in the Pacific Northwest depend on natural resources, particularly timber. This project includes workforce training opportunities that support good-paying jobs. These are jobs in the woods, supporting rural economies and healthy forests while adapting to climate change. Landowners are becoming more aware of the need to manage forests in a way that increases climate resilience and reduces wildfire risk, which means new ways of logging are in demand.

This project will equip workers with the skills to manage forests for enduring economic and forest health and serve as an incubator for new forest stewardship businesses.

As the building industry works to decarbonize buildings for clients and the future of our world, we help building professionals source wood from forests that are being managed to benefit the climate. These forests provide not only quantifiable carbon storage benefits, they also promote environmental, economic and cultural values. Our project offers the tools, data, and integrity needed to obtain high-quality wood that contributes to a better world.

This program identifies people practicing climate-smart forestry and creating climate-smart wood products and connects them to designers and wood buyers seeking climate-smart wood products.

Tribal Nations, small family forest owners, and other nonindustrial forest managers are our focus, with emphasis on:

• Tracing wood within the supply chain, from forest to frame.

• Providing transparency and a demonstrable climate benefit when sourcing wood.

• Supporting forestry with strong ecological and social objectives.

• Building forest health and resilience against anticipated climate impacts, including unpredictable weather events, catastrophic wildfire, and drought.

• Increasing carbon storage in forests and embodied carbon in building products.

The concept of “climate-smart” forestry and wood products emerges from the need to differentiate among widely variable timber harvest practices claiming to offer environmental and social values.

For this project, partners have adopted this framework from the Climate Smart Wood Group:

“Climate-smart forestry (CSF) increases forest resilience in the face of climate change and sequesters and stores more carbon over time when compared to conventional practices.”

We apply this broad framework across various forest types, conditions, and ownerships, seeking to show that climate-smart forestry exists along a spectrum of practice and can be adopted widely. In other words, there is no one way to practice climate-smart forestry, and practices will depend on the characteristics and current health of each forest.

Our goal is to establish trust, credibility, transparency, and integrity in this definition and the associated procurement methods that people in the building industry – and their clients – can rely on.

As part of this project, we are developing cutting-edge monitoring and reporting systems to illuminate the climate impacts of wood produced from different forested regions across the contiguous U.S., starting with the Pacific Northwest.

Over the course of this project, we will deploy a user-friendly web application designed for people in the building industry to understand the impacts of different wood purchasing options and reduce climate pollution embodied in building projects.

Following the working definition of Climate Smart Forestry introduced by the Climate Smart Wood Group, we are focused on enabling forest management and conservation activities that meaningfully integrate concerns for climate mitigation, climate adaptation, and social equity.

We recognize there are competing definitions and confusion related to climate-smart forestry (Cooper and MacFarlane, 2023), limitations to the use of carbon stock change as an indicator in working forests (Johnson 2009; Prisley and Sonne Hall, 2023), and growing skepticism regarding the efficacy of forest carbon offset projects (Coffield et al., 2022; Stapp et al., 2023) at removing atmospheric carbon. In this context, we are devoting significant attention to the development of transparent and reproducible analytical pipelines for quantifying and reporting forest impacts over time beginning with an emphasis on carbon stock change, timber output, and patterns in the intensity and extent of land use, land-use change, and natural disturbances in working forest landscapes.

Our approach to forest monitoring and reporting in this project draws from existing guidance and emerging standards for Life Cycle Assessment applied to products and supply chains, including the GHG Protocol (WRI & WBCSD, 2022) and Product Category Rules governing the development of Environmental Product Declarations (EPDs) for structural wood products in Europe and North America (CEN 2014, UL Environment 2019).

We are motivated in particular to help the forest sector adopt an evidence-based alternative to widely used but erroneous assumptions of biogenic carbon neutrality (Helin et al., 2013; Tellnes et al., 2017). The assumption of biogenic carbon neutrality, which treats source forests as exactly carbon neutral, has been employed in all forest product EPDs issued to date based on national-scale reporting that forest area or carbon stocks are non-declining. With access to open and reliable data on forest change at relevant scales, it is time we moved away from pretending any forest is exactly carbon neutral.

Our monitoring system is being designed to integrate estimates of forest conditions and changes derived from remote sensing along with ground-based reporting by the USFS Forest Inventory & Analysis (FIA) and Timber Products Output (TPO) programs using a combination of State-Space Modeling and Small Area Estimation.

Citations:

CEN, 2014. Round and sawn timber - Environmental Product Declarations - Product category rules for wood and wood-based products for use in construction (EN No. 16485: 2014). European Committee for Standardization: Brussels, Belgium. 27 pp.

Coffield, S.R., Vo, C.D., Wang, J.A., Badgley, G., Goulden, M.L., Cullenward, D., Anderegg, W.R.L., Randerson, J.T., 2022. Using remote sensing to quantify the additional climate benefits of California forest carbon offset projects. Global Change Biology 28, 6789–6806. https://doi.org/10.1111/gcb.16380

Cooper, L., MacFarlane, D., 2023. Climate-Smart Forestry: Promise and risks for forests, society, and climate. PLOS Climate 2, e0000212. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pclm.0000212

Helin, T., Sokka, L., Soimakallio, S., Pingoud, K., Pajula, T., 2013. Approaches for inclusion of forest carbon cycle in life cycle assessment - a review. GCB Bioenergy 5, 475–486. https://doi.org/10.1111/gcbb.12016

Johnson, E., 2009. Goodbye to carbon neutral: Getting biomass footprints right. Environmental Impact Assessment Review 29, 165–168. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.eiar.2008.11.002

Prisley, S.P., Sonne Hall, E., 2023. Calculating a Land Carbon Accounting Factor in the United States: an Example and Implications. Journal of Forestry fvad037. https://doi.org/10.1093/jofore/fvad037

Stapp, J., Nolte, C., Potts, M., Baumann, M., Haya, B.K., Butsic, V., 2023. Little evidence of management change in California’s forest offset program. Commun Earth Environ 4, 1–10. https://doi.org/10.1038/s43247-023-00984-2

Tellnes, L., Ganne-Chedeville, C., Dias, A., Dolezal, F., Hill, C., Zea Escamilla, E., 2017. Comparative assessment for biogenic carbon accounting methods in carbon footprint of products: a review study for construction materials based on forest products. iForest 10, 815–823. https://doi.org/10.3832/ifor2386-010

UL Environment, 2019. Part B: Structural and Architectural Wood Products EPD Requirements, in: Product Category Rule (PCR) Guidance for Building-Related Products and Services. UL Environment: Marietta, GA. 31 pp. https://www.shopulstandards.com/ProductDetail.aspx?UniqueKey=36412

WRI, WBCSD, 2022. Greenhouse Gas Protocol: Land Sector and Removals Guidance (Supplement to the GHG Protocol Corporate Standard and Scope 3 Standard No. Draft for Pilot Testing and Review), Greenhouse Gas Protocol. World Resources Institute and World Business Council for Sustainable Development, Washington, D.C. https://ghgprotocol.org/land-sector-and-removals-guidance