USA: Climate policy on private forest lands

“We need new markets to make that happen,” said Robert Bonnie, vice
president for land conservation and wildlife at the Environmental
Defense Fund, one of the Forest-Climate Working Group members. Almost
two-thirds of U.S. forest land is owned by about 10 million private
owners.

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The platform discusses how to maximize their climate benefits by
allowing forest owners to get paid for offsetting greenhouse gas
emissions within future federal cap-and-trade climate legislation,
which would require major fossil-fuel burners to either reduce their
own emissions or purchase carbon credits. The 30-member coalition,
which also includes timber giant Plum Creek and Defenders of Wildlife,
has been discussing its platform with key Senate committees that will
have a hand in shaping legislation this year.

“In the end, it was too important not to agree on core principles,” said Drue DeBerry, senior vice president of conservation for the American Forest Foundation, who a year ago began working to make the groups come together. With the forestry industry focused on project economics and conservation groups angling for environmental integrity, “it was definitely a struggle,” said DeBerry. Planting new forests, reforestation and forest management programs could all be fodder for sequestering carbon  dioxide and creating carbon offsets, the platform says.

But offsets are also a complicated accounting project — making sure the savings are real and not just a figment of paperwork can be a controversial  challenge. The coalition agreed that forest carbon offsets needed to  be established from quantifiable baselines, to make sure they  are “additional” and not actions the forest owner would have taken  anyway. Projects would also need to remove or sequester carbon from the atmosphere for 100 years, the platform says. If a tree is planted and then harvested for paper pulp or burned in a wildfire 10 years later, for example, those carbon savings could be lost.

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http://www.earthportal.org/news/?p=2184