Fall 2011

• America’s Private Forests: Status and Stewardship
• One Forest, One Future – New Pacific Forest Trust Report Provides Roadmap for Securing the Future of California’s Primary Watershed: the “Klamath-Cascade”
• The Klamath-Cascade: California’s Watershed in the Balance
• KC Report Preview: Executive Summary – A Landscape At the Crossroads
• KC Report Preview: Recommendations – A Greenprint for the Klamath-Cascade
• California Set to Make Climate History in 2012 – PFT’s Forest Carbon Work Comes Full Circle With Launch of AB32 Program
• Forest Fete 2011 – Celebrating Our Community of Forest Champions
• CA Sends Evergreen Gift to Capitol Hill

America’s Private Forests: Status and Stewardship

Marking a Decade of Conservation Advances

In this International Year of the Forest, it’s a good time to celebrate the past decade of focus on the conservation of America’s private forests. Ten years ago, a book of the same name written by Laurie Wayburn and me was published as a call to accelerate the conservation of our nation’s forests. At that time, America’s forests — the majority of which are in private ownership — were threatened anew with increasing turnover, break up into small parcels and outright loss on the one-way street to development.

“Expanding the application of working forest conservation easements was seen—and has been proven—to be a flexible, cost-effective method that has conserved millions of acres of  U.S. forestland.”

Remember that back then most public concern was focused on national forests and protection of the small blocks of remaining old growth. Our book described for the first time the impressive contributions of privately owned, working forests to the fundamental services our society and planet depend on — flows of clean water, indispensible habitat for fish and wildlife, vast banks for storing carbon, sources of recreation and inspiration, as well as sustainable supplies of wood for shelter, fiber and energy.

America’s Private Forests dug deep into USDA Forest Service data to find that more forest currently was being lost to development than had occurred since the early 20th century. We uncovered the new trend that, while forest cover nationally still seemed stable — thanks largely to the reversion to woodlands of abandoned marginal farmland in the Midwest — our most productive forests in the South and Pacific Northwest were declining at an alarming rate thanks to encroaching urban and suburban sprawl.

But America’s Private Forests was even more a call to action than a documentation of the challenges undermining the sustainability of the nation’s forests. With the advice of many forest owners, thought-leaders, scientists and conservationists, we laid out a strategic plan to accelerate the conservation of private forests. In the last ten years, the goals of this plan and tools to accomplish it have been embraced by agencies and organizations across the country.

Key to using conservation to counter the trend of forest loss is the increased use of new financial tools and public-private conservation partnerships. Expanding the application of working forest conservation easements was seen — and has been proven — to be a flexible, cost-effective method that has conserved millions of acres of U.S. forestland. Developing markets for the natural services delivered by forests, such as carbon sequestration and water purification, also is key to providing new sources of conservation-based revenue. This is critical to helping committed landowners keep their forests as forests, and provide the public goods and services we all depend on.

These ideas may have seemed speculative a decade ago, but as this issue goes to press the nation’s first economy-wide cap and trade program — which includes credits for carbon sequestration from forests — is poised for launch in California (see page 9). The state’s greenhouse gas regulations are driving a market for forest-based based carbon credits with the potential to incentivize millions of acres of forest conservation.

Central to building public engagement and organizing effective new conservation efforts is more and better information. In preparing America’s Private Forests, we shared our perspectives with the key scientists who gather and assess the nation’s forest data. They have responded with their tremendous series of Forests on the Edge reports, and the USDA as a whole has taken up the specific challenges identified in our book to track and address, as we’ve seen in its National Report on Sustainable Forests — 2010.

In this milestone year, PFT is applying what we’ve learned in the past decade to our new initiatives. On pages 4–8, we introduce PFT’s latest publication, The Klamath-Cascade: California’s Watershed in the Balance, which explores many of the broader concepts outlined in America’s Private Forests through the lens of a specific landscape in California. We invite you to read this new report and join with us in writing the next chapter of conservation progress.

Photos: PFT continues to promote public-private conservation partnerships with projects like the Bear Creek Working Forest Project near Mount Shasta. Landowner Roseburg Resources has committed to conserve and steward 8,230 acres of productive timberland specifically for its unique water resources with new revenue derived from a WFCE. California’s Wildlife Conservation Board has recommended the project for funding approval this fall. (Megan Wargo)

One Forest, One Future

New Pacific Forest Trust Report Provides Roadmap for Securing the Future of California’s Primary Watershed: the “Klamath-Cascade”

California derives the majority of its water—nearly two-thirds—from the forested landscape of the Klamath-Cascade Region, a vast arc of almost 10 million acres encompassing the forested mountains of the Trinity Alps, Klamath, Cascade and Northern Sierra Ranges. The Sacramento and Feather Rivers have their headwaters here and run through the Klamath-Cascade landscape before supplying the Central Valley and State Water Projects and then flowing into San Francisco Bay.

The Region is home to the most biodiverse conifer forests in the world, and supports more than 600 species—including 116 considered imperiled, threatened or endangered. In comparison to California’s other natural treasures, the “KC” has a low profile. Few Californians realize how much they depend on its water and climate benefits—nor how at-risk those resources are. Steep declines in the Region’s timber economy have eroded incentives to retain and maintain its forests, private or public.

PFT is working to change that with the publication of The Klamath-Cascade: California’s Watershed in the Balance. This 33-page report introduces the Region and makes recommendations for a new, “all-lands” approach to its management in order to secure the future of California’s primary water source.

A host of factors perpetuate forest conversion, neglect and degradation: globalization, climate change, invasive species, the economic crisis, changing demographics and ownerships are just a few. We need to act swiftly to ensure the continued health of the Klamath-Cascade’s intact, forested watersheds that are so critical to all Californians.

Over the next two decades, we have a historic opportunity to achieve landscape-scale conservation and restoration of this vital resource. Investing in the Klamath-Cascade’s watershed and ecosystem health will ensure key water supplies for the state, as well as all the other public benefits the Region provides. Managing and conserving this region as the one great forest it naturally is—rather than as a fragmented, incoherent landscape—promotes watershed and climate services, adaptation and ecosystem health, reduces fire risk and supplies renewable energy. It is the fundamental basis for transforming a declining timber economy into a sustainable forest economy.

We’ve reprinted the Report’s executive summary and recommendations in this issue of Forest Life. You can download the full publication on our webpage: e-mail communications@pacificforest.org to request a bound copy.

The Klamath-Cascade: California’s Watershed in the Balance

Mounts Shasta and Lassen are iconic, defining features of California, towering skyward from one of the state’s most productive and beautiful regions: the Klamath-Cascade. Spanning almost 10 million acres, this is amongst California’s most valuable natural resource regions. Klamath-Cascade forests provide the vast majority of the state’s water. They are also the most diverse conifer forests globally and form California’s historic “timber-basket.”

Now, the Region is at a crossroads. Global competition, sprawling development, and a depressed economy have the Region’s traditional, timber-based communities struggling to survive. By proxy, that timber economy paid for keeping a working forest landscape with all its resources intact, from water to wildlife to recreation. Effective from the 1850s through most of the 1900s, this proxy approach is no longer sufficient in the 21st century. With its cities growing from 300-600% in the last 2 ½ decades, the Region’s vital forest infrastructure is fragmenting and under attack. A new resource economy is needed to secure this broad base of forest services—water, timber, wood-based renewable energy, recreation, and climate stabilization—that all Californians rely on.

Ruggedly beautiful, globally renowned, essential to the state’s vibrant economy and highly threatened—the future of the Klamath-Cascade is in our hands.

Photo credits, clockwise from top left: Mike Hupp, Megan Wargo, iStockphoto, Laurie A. Wayburn , © DLILLC/Corbis, PFT Collection.

KC Report Preview: Executive Summary

A Landscape At the Crossroads

A hidden treasure, the Klamath-Cascade is the primary source of California’s most critical natural resource: water.

Most Californians don’t realize this region provides the vast majority of the state’s water. But it does, and this role will be increasingly important with climate change.

The Klamath-Cascade is ruggedly beautiful, resource-rich, globally renowned for outdoor recreation, and still relatively low in population. Such places often are loved to death or driven to steep declines as resources are depleted, commodity markets shift, and unplanned sprawl destroys the very fount of their wealth and culture. Already, the Klamath-Cascade is being pressured by some of the Region’s fastest growing communities in Redding, Ashland and Reno. Signs of this are evident with significant growth in ranchettes and sprawl. The Klamath-Cascade’s fiercely independent rural culture is caught within a web of urban influences, remote federal politics, and global economies.

But the people who live in and love “the KC” have the opportunity to chart a different path. The full value and potential of its natural resources are just beginning to emerge. A vibrant alternative future is emerging, built on a forest economy as diversified as the Region’s resources and people, grounded in conserving the Region’s natural infrastructure, and focused on producing the broad suite of goods and services it naturally provides.

During the 1800s and 1900s, a “gold rush” on the Region’s forests depleted its tremendous wealth of grand old growth. In the 21st century, we recognize a more essential liquid gold pouring from the woods: water. The Klamath-Cascade is the “top of the tap” for California’s water supply. These forest watersheds collect, store, clean and transport more water than anywhere else in the state. With climate change, this region’s watersheds are predicted to accumulate even more snow pack, essential for the state’s summer water. Mount Shasta’s glaciers are growing, unlike those of the Sierra. Conservation, restoration and sustainable management of the Region’s forested watersheds are essential to the state’s continued water supply and its economic vitality.

Water from this region underwrites a $37 billion dollar agricultural economy annually — almost a third of the state’s total. The Klamath-Cascade also supplies drinking water to almost 25 million Californians. Water demand is expected to increase by a whopping 33% over the next 20 years. Having to replace water from the Klamath-Cascade, were it to decline, would be exorbitantly expensive.

Policies from the 19th and 20th centuries promoted timber production and the forest products industry, and a number of state and federal policies continue to do so. Yet, though water supplies are certainly as important as timber for the state, there are no focused policies to ensure the Region’s continued watershed health. Policies promoting timber production alone are insufficient to prevent conversion of this land for development — a primary cause of watershed degradation — or to ensure high quality watershed function. In fact, these forests have become increasingly fragmented and degraded over the past 50 years, even as water has become more valuable.

The historic economic model won’t support 21st century economies or watersheds. Policies for the past, more rural, less populous world cannot be relied upon to provide for the needs of our urbanized and globalized society. Existing policies and incentives are not aligned with maintaining and restoring California’s forest watersheds. But they need to be.

Watershed integrity declines if less than 85% of it is forested. What must we do to hedge against this risk of watershed degradation? Establish policy to conserve and restore watersheds. Working with willing partners—landowners and federal agencies—to conserve and restore well-managed forests, we could eliminate this risk to the Klamath-Cascade watershed. What would it cost? In today’s dollars, managing that risk might cost $2.5-3 billion — the capital cost of two desalinization plants, providing only a small fraction, less than 3%, of the water the Sacramento River provides. Conservation is the most cost-effective approach, by far, to ensure this water supply.

Paradoxically, the current economic collapse also brings the opportunity to diversify and strengthen a broad, forest-centered economy. By reversing the trend of forest loss and fragmentation, we build the foundation of a new forest economy that integrates the legacy of timber products into a future of forest products. By focusing on watershed protection and restoration as management goals, sustainable timber harvest can continue. Restoration activities will increase renewable energy supplies while decreasing fire suppression costs. The Region’s unique biodiversity can be conserved. These forests, so managed, will also be more reliable carbon sinks, providing invaluable mitigation for increasing emissions of carbon dioxide. Investments in forest conservation and stewardship create more jobs per dollar than in any other sector. Thus, partnering with landowners to conserve and restore this most important water fountain of the state will underpin an economy as diversified as the Region’s forests, products and people.

Today, we are at the crossroads. Down one path, the Region continues to fragment and develop, watershed function declines, and the traditional resource economy continues to falter. Pockmarked with sprawl, watersheds will be conserved in islands of federally owned forests—which are increasingly degraded.

Down the other path, we shift our focus from single, siloed economies of timber and development to an integrated, diversified forest economy. We invest, at a fraction of the cost of other solutions, in conserving this water source. We diversify economic investment policies to promote restoration and maintenance of natural watershed infrastructure. We develop appropriately scaled, sustainable biomass energy while restoring watersheds and decreasing fire-fighting costs. We promote climate services in forests here at home. We build a new resource economy for the 21st century in the Klamath-Cascade grounded in conservation and sustained into the future.

Which path we choose will make all the difference.

Photos: (Top Right) Redding, the Region’s principal city, has grown over 600% since the 1960s, now covering over 345 square miles. (Photo by USDA, 2005)

(Above) Though encircled by development and threatened with increasing fragmentation, the 10 million acre Klamath-Cascade Region still remains relatively intact. This “lights at night” image illustrates the development pressures encroaching on the Region: Reno to the east; Interstate 5 bisecting the center; the San Francisco/Sacramento axis to the south; and Ashland to the north. However, with willing partners, we now have a historic opportunity for landscape-level conservation in this globally recognized Region so essential to California’s water supply. (Photo by NASA, 2001)

KC Report Preview: Recommendations – A Greenprint for the Klamath-Cascade

1. Manage the Klamath-Cascade for watershed services:

• Conserve 85% of watersheds as well-managed forest across ownerships;
• Establish a collaborative state-federal partnership to achieve watershed conservation goals;
• Expand incentives for working forest conservation easements (WFCEs);
• Increase management of federal forests to restore and maintain adaptive, resilient watersheds.

2. Dedicate a percentage of annual funding from state and federal water projects to watershed conservation
and restoration:

• Prioritize support for acquisition of WFCEs until conservation goals are largely achieved;
• Focus watershed restoration funding on conserved lands.

3. Invest in restoration forest management:

• Restore resilient, adaptive, native forest types;
• Promote restoration to maintain complex, diverse natural habitats;
• Coordinate federal and private management efforts for landscape outcomes;
• Provide reliable cost-share support for sub-basin level restoration management.

4. Invest in proactive fuels management:

• Transition a portion of fire suppression and insurance programs to fund fuels reduction, beginning with federal forests;
• Institute greater state support for insurance of private lands prescribed fire;
• Reassess air pollution control requirements where catastrophic fires can be reduced/prevented.

5. Dedicate a portion of federal and state renewable energy and fuel subsidies to woody biomass energy/fuel facilities:

• Support small scale, community-to-county level biomass facilities up to 15 megawatts;
• Collaborate with willing counties for local energy independence;
• Prioritize co-generation (CHP) facilities;
• Obtain woody biomass fuel from restoration and maintenance management.

Left: This analysis illustrates the intensity of threats to key watersheds in the Region, using a color scale from red to green, red denoting the highest degree of threat to the highest value resources. The area around Mt. Shasta, with its invaluable water sources, high development demand, easy access from Interstate 5, and a declining forest industry infrastructure, ranks as most highly threatened and critical to conserve

For Copies of the Report:
Phone: 415-561-0700
E-mail: communications@pacificforest.org

California Set to Make Climate History in 2012

PFT’s Forest Carbon Work Comes Full Circle With Launch of AB32 Program

California is preparing to launch the first economy-wide climate program in the nation, making history in its efforts to control the greenhouse gases fueling climate change.

In October, California’s Air Resources Board (ARB) culminated nearly five years of its climate work when it approved the centerpiece of the Global Warming Solutions Act (AB 32) — a “cap and trade” program that places a price on carbon emissions. The adoption of the cap and trade program, which will be tested in 2012 and comes fully online in 2013, represents a huge opportunity for forest landowners to receive financial benefits for removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and safely storing it in their forests. It also marks a milestone in PFT’s policy efforts to reward landowners for exceptional forestry and stewardship of forests’ multiple values — wood, water, wildlife and a well-balanced climate.

If development potential and timber are the only marketable resources derived from forests, they will by necessity be converted and harvested as quickly as possible. PFT’s focus is to reward landowners for managing their forests as forests, stewarding the full range of services the landscape naturally provides. Diversifying landowner’s revenues helps them to conserve and manage their forests to provide the full range of benefits we need. The ability of forests to absorb and store the carbon that fuels climate change in forests is just such a service.

PFT has been heavily engaged in making sure California’s new climate program recognizes the synergy between 1) reducing forest loss and degradation — the second largest global source of CO2 emissions — and 2) developing a market for financial returns from the restoration of forests and their essential climate benefits.

In PFT’s initial legislative drive to help solve the climate crisis, we worked with CA Senator Byron Sher to develop Senate Bill 812 (2002), which successfully included forests in California’s landmark voluntary program to combat climate change. This program, the precursor to AB 32’s regulatory program, called for the creation of the “Forest Project Offset Protocols.” These protocols were integrated into California’s cap and trade program and provide a new opportunity to reward landowners nationwide for committing to better forest management.

Under the cap and trade program, the largest carbon emitters in the state are grouped under a “cap,” which represents their current emissions. Each year those covered by the cap must surrender allowance credits equivalent to the amount of carbon pollution their facility is putting into the atmosphere. Over time, allowances will become more expensive — encouraging facilities to find ways to reduce emissions and reduce their costs of compliance.

Besides buying or trading allowance credits among themselves, the other way emitters can comply with their emissions obligations is to purchase offsets, including those from forest landowners who have made long-term commitments to remove CO2 from the atmosphere through improved forest management and measure these increases in forest carbon with the Forest Offset Protocol. This provides significant revenue to the landowner and offers a cost-control mechanism for facilities by allowing them flexibility in meeting their emissions obligations under the cap.

While the adoption of the cap and trade rules is a huge accomplishment, there are several other significant forest-related elements of AB 32 still under development. We look forward to working with ARB in 2012 on refining a statewide inventory of forest carbon so we can better track changes in how much carbon California’s forests hold year-to-year. In addition, we will continue to advance policies to ensure that the conversion of forests to other uses is fully mitigated so we don’t lose this vital source of carbon sequestration.

Photo: (Above) Foresters monitor the Van Eck Forest Project in Humboldt County, CA. Developed and managed by PFT, it was California’s first verified and registered carbon emissions reduction project.

Forest Fete 2011

Celebrating Our Community of Forest Champions

Times are tough for many forest landowners. But a strong community — and positive mindset — can help pull you through, advised Allyn Ford, who was honored as this year’s Forest Champion at the Pacific Forest Trust’s annual Forest Fete on September 21.

“We have to be optimists,” said Ford, President and CEO of Roseburg Forest Products, upon accepting his award. “We have to believe the future is going to be good. You can’t just sit there with your head in your hands, worrying.”

That optimism and willingness to confront challenges is a hallmark of Ford, who was instrumental in PFT’s outreach to national lawmakers during 2010 efforts to pass federal climate and energy legislation. That legislation stalled — but Ford’s commitment to pioneering a new forest resource economy grounded in conservation hasn’t. Roseburg has taken a big step to demonstrate the economic value in conservation in the past year, with the launch of a multi-phase conservation initiative that kicked off with its Bear Creek Working Forest Project. With this 8,230-acre project, Ford and Roseburg are demonstrating the value of conservation and stewardship to their local economy, serving as a model to other landowners.

“In working with the Pacific Forest Trust, we’re supporting our communities and economies by focusing on sustainability and social values,” Ford said. “In a sense, there are certain asset values of forestland that don’t come to the market, and I think PFT is moving forward to fill that gap and provide us with the tools that allow us to focus on what we do best — forestry. But all these goals and objectives come back to the land. It is our base. It is our anchor.”

Community was a prominent theme at Forest Fete this year, as keynote speaker John Laird, California’s Secretary for Natural Resources, noted the unique makeup of the Fete audience.

“What our forests and our mountains and the waters there mean to our state is incredibly significant. And who you are is incredibly significant, because for a long time nobody hopped across divisions, nobody looked at different interests and how they might become common interests. There wasn’t a group of people in one room like this,” Laird said. “I salute all the winners tonight because they’re in the business of getting things done. And we can work together to make sure 100 years from now, working forests are resilient to climate change, protected from development and a contributing part of the economy. It’s a future we can work together to build.”

Among this year’s winners was USDA Secretary Tom Vilsack, the 2011 Outside-the-Box Honoree. He referenced the need for new markets — and strong partnerships — when it came to realizing a new, 21st century vision of conservation that will support a modern forest economy.

“I’ve called on the nation to move away from the polarizing debates and to embrace a shared vision to make our forests more resilient to climate change while protecting water resources, improving forest health and most important now, creating jobs,” he said, in a video acceptance taped for the event. “We should be promoting energy, markets for carbon and sustainable bio-energy and establishing other incentives to provide rural landowners with new income opportunities… The Pacific Forest Trust has been incredibly effective at forging these types of incentives and partnerships with far-reaching results.”

To read transcripts of PFT President Laurie Wayburn and Vilsack’s comments, learn more about this year’s awardees and see photos from the event visit our Forest Fete homepage.

Photos: (Top right) Roseburg Resources President and CEO Allyn Ford displays his Forest Champion award alongside PFT President Laurie Wayburn. (Lower right) Forest Fete guests bid at the silent auction. Photos by Toni Gauthier.

CA Sends Evergreen Gift to Capitol Hill

The “People’s Tree” is on the move! On Nov. 5, the U.S. Capitol Christmas Tree began its journey to Washington, D.C., and will be stopping in communities across the country. The Pacific Forest Trust is proud to be the primary non-profit partner working with the Stanislaus National Forest to send this evergreen gift to the nation’s capitol as a reminder of the many gifts forests provide — during the holidays and all year long. You can track and support the tree on its cross-country journey by following its schedule of stops and related special events at www.capitolchristmastree2011.org.

“We can work together to make sure 100 years from now, working forests are resilient to climate change, protected from development and a contributing part of the economy.”

—John Laird, Calif. Sec. for Natural Resources, Speaking at Forest Fete 2011. Read More on Page 11.