Spring 2012

“Watershed Health: A Burning Issue”

Inside this issue:

• President’s Letter – What’s Wrong with this Picture?
• PFT Honored as 2012 ‘Climate Action Champion’
• Farm Bill 2012: Growing Forest Legacy
• Yosemite: A 150th Anniversary Gift
• Watershed Health: A Burning Issue
• Restoring Forests and Supplying Renewable Energy
• Bear Creek Working Forest: Conserved protecting 8,230 acres near Mount Shasta
• Laney Thornton: An Up-Close Approach to Advancing Global Sustainability
• CSNM Connections – Landowners, BLM, and PFT Join to Link Habitat in the Monument

President’s Letter: What’s Wrong with this Picture?

This March, I experienced April in Washington, D.C. it seemed unreal to be in this lovely sea of cherry blossoms, to bask in the warm and fragrant air. But, unlike so much of our political debate, this was real. The 85-degree warmth was a full 25 degrees above normal. March set over 7,500 weather records in the United States alone.

Climate change is happening, and the symptoms are everywhere. Indeed, our allergy season is now two weeks longer. The oceans are a full degree warmer.

We are in the midst of the most powerful, intense, swift change to our shared global environment in any of our lifetimes, and you might think Congress passed a law requiring ignorance of the amazing changes right outside their windows! For, in Congress, climate change is rarely—if ever—mentioned, and any action to prevent or prepare for it is completely stalled.

Fortunately, one state is moving swiftly and effectively.

California is now implementing its landmark legislation to curtail and adapt to global warming, AB 32. The first allowance auctions for the cap and trade portion of the program are scheduled to start later this year. Forests are expected to supply much of the offsets that will help control costs for compliance through projects that enable landowners to restore the bigger, older forests that secure more carbon.

But forests’ contributions to California’s climate program aren’t limited to offsets. California also has adopted a policy of “no net loss” of forest climate benefits, committing to reduce and mitigate forest-based emissions created by forest loss and degradation or waste wood going to landfills. Forests can restore balance when managed to be more resilient to a changing climate and the more intense stresses—drought, fire, disease and pests—accompanying it. So managed, forests provide sustainable, renewable energy that helps pay to steward the land for natural resiliency.

Forests also are the leading front for adaptation to a changing climate. Here, too, California is taking the lead. Allowance auction revenues are projected to be in the tens of billions of dollars during the period 2012–2020. These must be spent on actions that reduce net emissions quickly and permanently. They should also promote adaptation strategies. Key to adaptation is securing our water supplies that are essential for drinking and agriculture, and saving the species we all depend on in so many ways. Forests must play a keystone role in such efforts.

For decades, the truism has been “As California goes, so goes the nation,” be it for economic innovation or environmental sustainability. As we see the climate disruption across the nation, and indeed the globe, California is a leader for all to follow.

— Laurie A. Wayburn, President

PFT Honored as 2012 ‘Climate Action Champion’

The country’s largest carbon registry and offsets verification program has honored the Pacific Forest Trust (PFT) with its annual “Climate Action Champion” award, recognizing a decade of successful efforts to address climate change by harnessing the power of forests in California’s landmark program to combat climate change. Forests play a fundamental role in that plan thanks to leadership by PFT, according to the Climate Action Reserve (CAR), the non-profit, private agency formed to ensure environmental benefit, integrity, and transparency in the carbon offset market.

“This is truly revolutionary work,” said CAR president Gary Gero, describing PFT as “truly visionary” in its work to lead the development of forest carbon accounting rules that can be applied to projects around the United States. “It’s the first time in any regulated, economy-wide greenhouse gas market that forest credits are recognized. And it’s due to the vision of the Pacific Forest Trust.”

Photo: PFT president Laurie Wayburn holds up a prizefighter’s belt at CAR’s annual “Climate Action Champion” awards ceremony

Farm Bill 2012: Growing Forest Legacy

Public-private partnerships are what make the USDA Forest Service’s Forest Legacy Program one of our best tools for conserving working forests. That’s why the Pacific Forest Trust and more than 40 other landowners, state agencies, conservation organizations and land trusts are recommending the next iteration of the Farm Bill strengthens those partnerships by allowing state agencies to call on qualified land trusts to help hold and maintain conservation easements funded by the program.

Together, we’ve reached out to ranking members of the Senate and House Agriculture committees to request this simple administrative change to the Forest Legacy program, which provides money to states to pay for public-private conservation efforts with fees generated by offshore oil and gas leases.

While Forest Legacy is a powerful tool for the conservation of working forestlands, the program is constrained by the fact that only governmental entities are allowed to hold the conservation easements it funds. Because easements entail ongoing stewardship and monitoring obligations from entities that hold them, Forest Legacy can require a substantial commitment of resources by state implementing agencies. In this time of tightening budgets, these administrative costs can represent a considerable burden—and disincentive—for states to conserve land with Forest Legacy funds.

“States already can partner with land trusts to implement other key federal-state conservation programs, including the Natural Resources Conservation Service’s Farm and Ranch Lands Protection Program and conservation grants under the North American Wetlands Conservation Act,” said Laurie Wayburn, president of the Pacific Forest Trust, which helped bring the Forest Legacy program to California in 1995. “This approach encourages additional funding partnerships with the charitable sector, as well, given that philanthropies often prefer to give to non-profits rather than undertake what they see as a government obligation. Enabling Forest Legacy to follow suit would make this powerful program even better.”

Yosemite: A 150th Anniversary Gift

2014 marks the 150th anniversary of President Abraham Lincoln and Congress making the Yosemite Land Grant, the first time U.S. land was publicly protected for its scenic values and for public benefit. PFT and other friends of Yosemite are preparing for this milestone by working with U.S. Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) and Congressman Jeff Denham (R-CA) to adjust the Park’s western boundary to eliminate the threat of proposed development and fulfill the original vision of John Muir.

If all goes well, visitors to this crown jewel of the Sierra will be able to enjoy nearly 2,000 additional acres of forests, meadows, rocky ridges and streams sandwiched between the Park and Sierra National Forest, which were left out of the original park boundaries due to political pressure over a century ago.

Since 2004, PFT has been working collaboratively with the national Park Service and willing sellers to purchase and conserve properties along the Park’s western border. By including these lands within Park boundaries, we can enable the Park Service to decrease development threat along the Park’s western border while enhancing wildlife habitat, scenic vistas and recreational opportunities.

This transfer of ownership has local bipartisan support, in part because of the money it will save Mariposa County, where providing adequate services to potential developments in remote areas is prohibitively expensive. Let your federal legislators know you support this gift of conservation in time for Yosemite’s anniversary celebrations!

Watershed Health: A Burning Issue

In 2002, the largest fire in Colorado’s history burned more than 138,000 acres of national forest in Denver’s watersheds. The conflagration came four years after 12,000 acres burned in the same area. Heavy rainstorms followed, severely eroding the landscape and sending a deluge of sediment, burned logs and other debris into the Strontia Springs Reservoir, the primary water storage facility for the city of Denver. More than $40 million in damage to the water system was caused; federal taxpayers and Denver Water ratepayers were left to foot the bill of almost $120 million for cleaning up their water supplies.

The high toll of catastrophic wildfire is a grave concern in the West. Historically, regularly occurring, low-intensity fires have actually improved forest health. But a century of suppressing wildfires near increasingly populated areas has created unnatural stockpiles of fuel in our forests.

One errant spark can create massive blazes like northern California’s 2007 Moonlight Fire, which burned 65,000 acres and threatened 500 homes. The state’s three-year drought culminated the following year with historically dry conditions. Dry lightening strikes started more than 2,780 individual fires over a matter of days, killing 23 people and choking communities throughout the state with smoke.

“Experts predict that climate change and drought will exacerbate water shortages and cause larger, more intense wildfires that essentially caramelize forest floors, increasing flooding and sedimentation.”

—High Country News

Climate change has the potential to significantly elevate threats to forest watersheds—and downstream water supplies—from fire, drought, pest infestations and disease. The implications have resource managers, forest scientists, and NGOs like the Pacific Forest Trust (PFT) advancing strategies to help our forest water- sheds adapt to increasingly erratic weather and harsher conditions.

“Climate change is forcing a reconsideration of all options. Not only does a warming climate directly impact water supply and storage, it also aggravates the risks posed by wildfire,” write UC Merced Professor Roger Bales and his co-authors of Forests and Water in the Sierra Nevada. “In short, climate change has created an urgent need for managers to intervene in order to continue providing ecosystem services from mountain forests.”

Part of the Problem, Part of the Solution

Our forest ecosystems play a unique role in regulating earth’s climate. As the lungs of the planet, they absorb and store the greenhouse gases driving climate change through photosynthesis. But our beneficial forest carbon “sinks” actually contribute to climate change when they are degraded or converted for development. Warming temperatures may impair our forests and their capacity to reduce atmospheric carbon further as altered precipitation patterns and diminished snowpack lead to longer, drier, hotter, and more destructive fire seasons.

“It’s a feedback loop—climate change makes our forests more vulnerable to drought, beetle kills, disease, and more frequent, severe incidents of fire. That leads us back to more emissions and further damage to our atmosphere and our watersheds,” says PFT president and co-founder Laurie Wayburn. “But we can interrupt this vicious cycle with adaptive forest management that makes our landscapes more naturally resilient to fire and climate change.”

Climate change impacts will be exacerbated by further forest conversion and loss to development. The recession—and its associated slow-down in new development—won’t last forever. University of Vermont researchers recently released a study indicating second homes are now consuming northeastern forest cover once thought to be increasing as farmers abandoned agricultural lands. At pre-recession levels of development, California could lose 170,000 acres of forestland by 2020, resulting in 37 million metric tons of CO2 emissions.

Helping Watersheds Adapt

We can help secure our watersheds from development with public-private conservation partnerships that keep land productive and forested in perpetuity. Research into adaptive management has also become a priority, said Malcolm North, Ph.D., a UC Davis associate professor and research scientist for the US Forest Service.

This is something my colleagues and I are working on—how do we make the forest more resilient so it can deal with more extreme events? The interesting thing about the climate question in California is we’re sure the temperature will go up but we don’t know what will happen with precipitation,” North said. “We just know it’s going to fluctuate a lot more. Bigger and longer droughts and more intense wet periods—which suggests you need a forest that can deal with those shocks to the system.”

Forest stewardship activities like thinning and controlled burns can help reduce fuel loads, increase water flows, and create more natural forest conditions—but these activities can eat into the often-narrow profit margins for forest landowners.

Increasingly, foresters and landowners are looking at markets for renewable energy created by wood “residue”—or the waste vegetation created by forest thinning—as a new revenue stream that could pay for restoration projects (see our ‘Renewable Energy’ story on page 8). Such forest renewables provide biomass energy that can reduce our dependence on fossil fuels.

“There is both need and demand for significantly increased use of forest renewables from restoration forestry,” Wayburn writes in The Klamath-Cascade: California’s Watershed in the Balance. “Woody biomass energy development is an opportunity for the [Klamath-Cascade] Region’s people to again use fire to shape and restore the landscape—only this time burning within facilities to generate energy. It is also a promising source of both new revenue and employment.”

Some worry an increased use of forest biomass will come at too high a cost, with a potential for new emissions, and perverse incentives for harvesting larger trees for fuel. Wayburn agrees the market won’t work without safeguards. “Three things are essential. One, accurate accounting of the emissions released from and absorbed by the forest sector. Two, we need clearly defined sustainable fuel sheds. And third, we need to manage landscapes cohesively—wildlife, watersheds and fire don’t recognize property boundaries.”

Other options include direct investment in watershed protection. In Denver, the water utility has signed a $33 million cost-sharing agreement with the Forest Service for watershed restoration, including thinning and prescribed burns on 38,000 acres. The average cost to ratepayers: an extra $27 spread over five years—just pennies per bill. The Forest Service will cover $16.5 million of the costs.

“That’s a lot less than $160 million to deal with the aftermath of a devastating fire,” Wayburn noted. “And the natural infrastructure that delivers water to more than a million people is more than worth the investment.”

Photos, from top: As the climate changes, more forest watersheds are expected to show signs of tree death from beetle kills as well as disease, fire, and drought. (© Ron Erwin/All Canada Photos/Corbis) Middle: USDA Forest Service field trip participants observe where the September 2007 Moonlight fire burned up to a thinned portion of the Plumas national Forest near Quincy, CA, and was stopped, demonstrating the effectiveness of fuel reduction efforts in the area. This “defensible Fuel Profile Zone” was built as part of the Herger-Feinstein Quincy library Group (QlG) Pilot Project. (© Frank Stewart/ Counties’ QlG Forester) Above: Restoration of wet meadows yields increased water supplies while reducing fire risk and promoting adaptation for climate change.

Restoring Forests and Supplying Renewable Energy

Many U.S. forests need thinning to correct unnaturally dense conditions resulting from decades of fire suppression. Such “proactive restoration” can reduce the risk and intensity of wildfires while positioning forest ecosystems to be more resilient as the climate changes. Historically, many of these forests were adapted to regular, low-intensity fires.

Restorative forest management can be costly—but we can pay for it by building markets for sustainable energy created by combusting wood thinning residues for energy. These “forest renewables” can be generated by small-scale facilities located within forest com- munities that help pay for restoration while delivering local energy more efficiently. Located close to end-users, such small-scale facilities would cut down on the “line-loss” of energy transmitted across a far-flung power grid. Waste wood from sustainable “fuel-sheds” located nearby could supply energy efficiently for decades, while paying for watershed restoration and creating local jobs.

California’s Public Utilities Commission (PUC) has invested in programs supplying biomass energy programs—including forest renewables—since electricity deregulation in the 1990s. The PUC currently is developing the successor to that program. The Pacific Forest Trust (PFT) is working with the agency and stakeholders to ensure California invests in “forest renewables” through supporting small biomass facilities, and by urging the state to develop sustainability standards to ensure that forest biomass operations are focused on creating more healthy, resilient forests.

An initial PUC Staff Report recommends a substantial investment—at least $10 million annually—in bioenergy, including renewable energy from forests, and supports a distributed energy generation system.

Bear Creek Working Forest: Conserved!

Roseburg Resources and PFT Complete 8,230-Acre Conservation Easement Near Mount Shasta

We can count on a sustainable flow of water, wood, wildlife, jobs and many other benefits delivered by the Bear Creek Working Forest thanks to the successful completion of a conservation easement on this well-managed forest watershed near Mount Shasta earlier this year.

Funding for the $7.8 million project was approved by California’s Wildlife Conservation Board (WCB) last December. In February, the Pacific Forest Trust purchased the easement from landowner Roseburg Resources, which will continue to own and productively manage the 8,230-acre forest in accordance with the terms of the conservation agreement. Straddling Siskiyou and Shasta counties, the bear Creek Forest Project’s riparian areas, mature forests, aspen groves, montane chaparral, and wet meadows will be conserved in perpetuity, assuring habitat for threatened northern Spotted Owl, rare Pacific fishers, bald eagle, northern Goshawk, and more than 180 other species.

“We are grateful to the WCB for investing in this important partnership with Roseburg Resources,” said PFT co-CEO Connie Best, the project’s chief architect, who counted the Bella Vista, Morgan Family, S.D. Bechtel, Jr., and National Fish and Wildlife foundations, and Mary A. Crocker Trust among the supporters of our broader work in the Klamath-Cascade Region. “Bear Creek is emblematic of the landscape-scale conservation progress we can make together in this key watershed for the state.”

“We believe the future of our company and our industry is in managing our forests for all the public benefits they provide, including sustainable wood supplies, renewable energy, clean drinking water, habitat for fish and wildlife, and increased carbon storage,” added Roseburg president and CEO Allyn Ford. “Conservation easements provide us with compensation for this stewardship, making our business more robust. This project is good for business, good for jobs and good for the environment.”

Roseburg operates one of the two remaining sawmills in Siskiyou County, and is committed to keeping their forestlands intact, both physically and ecologically. But like its peers, family-owned Roseburg Resources has been under tremendous pressure in recent years from the housing market collapse, global competition, and restructuring of the U.S. forest industry. The Bear Creek project will help provide the company with new revenue to sustain their operations and keep their resource base secure. This will greatly benefit the regional economy, helping protect more than 230 high-quality jobs in an area where unemployment ranges from 16 to 19 percent—well above the state and national average—and buffering communities against more “boom and bust” economic cycles.

The easement also will strengthen protection of more than 50 miles of waterways providing drinking and irrigation water to millions farther south. The project completes the conservation of the upper bear Creek watershed, spawning grounds for the world-famous Fall River rainbow trout, and vital to the watershed health of the Fall River. The Fall River is a tributary of the Pit and a major source of water into lake Shasta on the Sacramento River, which supplies the majority of California’s agricultural and drinking water.

“Watershed health is central to the Bear Creek Working Forest Project as well as Proposition 84, the voter-approved measure that provides this grant money,” said John Donnelly, executive director of the WCB. “In addition to safeguarding water quality and supply, this public-private partnership with Roseburg Resources and the Pacific Forest Trust also promotes recreation, fish and wildlife habitat, and economic security in rural economies like Siskiyou and Shasta counties. This project successfully balances ecological and economic concerns with a holistic, landscape-level approach to conservation in a key watershed region.”

Laney Thornton: An Up-Close Approach to Advancing Global Sustainability

Laney Thornton doesn’t mind a little dirt when it comes to making a difference.

Thornton, a longtime San Francisco resident, supports several initiatives promoting sustainability. Working with non-profit groups like the Pacific Forest Trust (PFT), he invests in practical solutions for combatting climate change, generating renewable energy, conserving natural resources, and promoting reproductive health.

He could advance all those causes from the comfort of his offices with the Laney Thornton Foundation and the Flora L. Thornton Foundation. But you’re likely to find him, wife Pasha, and other members of the Thornton family, out in the field, actively engaging with those who benefit from their charitable giving. Thornton recently returned from a trip to the Amazon, where he and his daughter helped teach indigenous health care providers how to use donated iPad tablet computers for recording and presenting instructional videos in their native language.

Thornton also takes a boots-on-the-ground approach to his work with us. Most recently he joined PFT president Laurie Wayburn on a trip to the Klamath-Cascade Region to learn about conservation incentives that can help landowners keep their forests intact while enhancing their climate benefits.

“Understanding what an organization is doing and how well they’re doing it and seeing the results is all something best done firsthand, so I tend to take environmental trips,” Thornton said. “It really informs the grant making.”

While he enjoys personal engagement with the causes he supports, Thornton recognizes collective, big-picture approaches are needed to deal with global problems like climate change.

“We need replicable economic incentives for reducing emissions. That’s how we’ll move the needle,” Thornton remarked. “That’s where PFT is succeeding—they’re modeling mechanisms for dealing with climate change with forest projects that deliver new revenue for landowners. That’s a positive lead for other people to follow. If you can take forestland with a poor economic return that’s degraded and turn it into better forestland with better economic return that’s going to be replicated. That’s how you can make a difference.”

Thornton is a graduate of Harvard College (A.B. Cum Laude, ’67) and the Harvard Business School (M.B.A. ’69.) in the late 1970s, Laney co-founded the Eileen West Clothing Company, which also owns Lanz of Salzburg. Today, he spends his time as a diversified private investor and Trustee of the Laney Thornton Foundation and the Flora L. Thornton Foundation. (Giving is a Thornton family affair—Laney’s five children and his two nieces have all been active in Foundation grants.) Laney, his wife Pasha and their young son William split their time between their primary home in San Francisco and their vineyard in Sonoma.

CSNM Connections: Landowners, BLM, and PFT Join to Link Habitat in the Monument

Wildlife will have 1,445 more acres of connected—and protected—lands to roam in Oregon’s Cascade-Siskiyou National Monument, thanks to willing landowners who sought out PFT’s help in adding lands they own within CSNM boundaries to the Monument. Our latest addition to the CSNM links the Oregon Gulch Research natural Area to areas of BLM-owned land with old growth forest characteristics. The newly protected parcel was a high priority for funding, thanks to its location within a key watershed—the Jenny Creek—that protects at-risk salmon and other species. Endangered Northern Spotted Owls nest on BLM lands roughly half a mile away.

To date, PFT has safeguarded 5,528 acres within the CSNM, with strong landowner cooperation, lawmaker support and additional philanthropic funding from the Collins, Bullitt, and Weeden Foundations, as well as the Meyer Memorial Trust and other donors. These properties join together previously fragmented sections of public land within the Monument’s planning area, improving protection of its watersheds and wildlife habitat.