Carbon markets could offer middle road in divide over forests

When the Astoria City Council got the results of a forest inventory in the Bear Creek Watershed about a decade ago, councilors learned the city was in possession of far more valuable trees, and timber, than they had realized.

In light of the news, some members of the council in northwest Oregon wanted to boost timber harvests and revenue for city services and infrastructure. The 3,700-acres of forests that protect the city’s main drinking water source have been logged semi-regularly for decades, sending millions of dollars to the city budget over the years. But other members of the council, concerned the watershed had been too heavily logged in the past, wanted the newfound bounty to be protected for the future.

The debate among council members over whether to cut or keep the trees was a microcosm of the long lingering divide over logging and conservation that exists today over the 18 million acres of federal forests in Oregon and the less than 1 million acres of forest owned by the state.

The Astoria City Council members decided to call a carbon project developer, to see whether there was a way to make some money off their newfound tree inventory without increasing harvests. It’s a decision that a small but growing number of public landowners and managers in the state are making: scale back logging, and attempt to offset some of the lost timber revenue with revenue from the sale of carbon credits earned by keeping the forest intact.

The City Council learned the carbon revenue would not be worth as much as the timber revenue they’d give up by forgoing increased harvests, but they could, through delaying some harvests and allowing longer rotations before trees were cut, generate carbon credits worth more than $2 million, that would offset 240,000 additional metric tons of carbon dioxide from being released into the atmosphere over 40 years.

“Carbon was kind of a nice compromise point, where the folks that were interested in seeing less harvest, and those that wanted to see more harvest for revenue, were able to find some common ground,” said David Ford, owner of L&C Carbon and the carbon project developer councilors called. In 2023, Hood River County along the Columbia River made a similar calculation, and voted to put nearly all 30,000 acres of its public tree farm into the voluntary carbon market in exchange for an estimated $24 million in revenue over the life of the project and an agreement not to increase harvests.

But those compromises can come at more than a financial cost, according to Bev Law, professor emeritus of forest ecology at Oregon State University and an expert on global forest carbon storage. From a land use perspective, Oregon forests are some of the best on Earth to combat climate change because of their extraordinary ability to capture and store carbon dioxide, but to do so, they have to be left intact.

Law’s research has found that globally, existing forests can store twice as much carbon, curb biodiversity loss and protect critical drinking water supplies if they are managed for preservation and growth, not logging. Intact forests could help advance global goals to reach net-zero carbon emissions by 2050.

She’s proposed state and federal agencies put aside high value, high priority forests to help fight climate change, and to reduce logging significantly and to end some logging on public forests in the West.

“When you’re logging, you’re always putting more carbon into the atmosphere than you would have if you just let the forest grow,” she said. “You’re adding to the problem.”

Logging legacy

For most of the last century, Oregon was adding significantly to the problem by overlogging, and forests were a net carbon emitter. About 65% of the forest carbon that’s been logged from Oregon forests during the last century has been returned to the atmosphere as carbon dioxide, and the rest is stored in long-lived wood products, like two-by-fours in houses and wood furniture, or in landfills, having been used for short-term products like paper and cardboard, Law found. Levels of forest carbon that existed in Oregon 200 years ago are unlikely to be recovered, according to Law’s research, but increases are possible.

Oregon forests likely started becoming a net benefit to the climate in the early 1990s, after the passage of the Northwest Forest Plan, which led to an 80% reduction of logging on federal forests in the region to protect threatened and endangered species. Because the bulk of forests in Oregon are managed by federal agencies, it led to a dramatic reduction in logging in the state that has since made forests in Oregon a net carbon sink, according to research from the U.S. Forest Service.

Since the passage of the Northwest Forest Plan, Oregon’s forests have been removing and storing anywhere from 23 million to 63 million metric tons worth of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere each year, according to research from Law’s colleague Mark Harmon, a professor emeritus of forest ecology at Oregon State University. At the high end, that’s equal to taking about 15 million gas-powered cars off of roads each year.

Today, Oregon’s total 30 million acres of forests store about 11.6 billion metric tons worth of carbon dioxide, keeping it on the ground and out of the atmosphere. Law has suggested that the state and federal government should grow this carbon bank as a strategic tool in the fight against climate change.

Strategic carbon reserves

To do this, Law has proposed taking an existing, albeit far less green, carbon storage plan, and turning it on its head.

Since the administration of former President Jimmy Carter, the U.S. government has kept hundreds of millions of barrels of crude oil stored in underground salt caves along the Texas and Louisiana coasts to guard against an unpredictable energy future, and to use as leverage in foreign policy making.

Law has argued a similar approach should be taken to protect the nation’s forest carbon under an uncertain climate future.

“We have strategic petroleum reserves. Why don’t we have strategic forest reserves?” she said.

She and a team of researchers from across the West found that protecting 30% of what they called high-priority forests in 11 Western states by 2030 – which would involve extending the highest federal protections to an additional 25 million to 36 million acres of forests in those states – could triple the amount of carbon stored and protected in those forests.

This would have the additional benefits of helping to meet global goals aimed at preserving rapidly declining biodiversity of many species and protecting water quality and quantity in the West.

About 90% of all people in the West are served by public drinking water systems that rely on water originating in national forests and grasslands. And nearly 80% of surface drinking water sources in Oregon originate or travel through forests before they ever hit water treatment plants and taps, Law said.

Protecting 30% of high-priority forests in Oregon would mean adding about 6 million acres of state and federal forests to a strategic reserve program by 2030 that would prohibit logging. Currently, less than 10% of Oregon forests receive such protection from human disturbance.

Among the areas in Oregon Law proposed to be considered strategic reserve areas are the Eagle Cap Wilderness in the Blue Mountains, the Kalmiopsis Wilderness in the Klamath Mountains, Crater Lake National Park in the Cascades and in the Coast Range, the Devil’s Staircase Wilderness and the Elliott State Forest. Fights over the latter, long logged for revenue for schools, have been ongoing for years

On Oct. 15, the State Land Board took a historic vote on the Elliott’s future, approving a plan that prioritizes research, biodiversity and carbon storage on the 83,000-acre forest.

Logging will still happen, though less than in the past, to generate timber revenue alongside revenue from the sale of carbon credits. Under the 40 year plan, the forest is expected to take an additional 435,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and generate up to $9 million on the sale of carbon credits.

This is, according to Brett Brownscombe, the Elliott State Forest transition director at the Department of State Lands, part of a larger strategy to advance and debate different approaches to forestry on public lands in the state, and to show that logging, biodiversity and climate objectives can all be incorporated into forest management plans. Implementing the plan is expected to begin in the spring of 2025.

Brownscombe said the Elliott can mark a middle ground between logging and carbon storage – just as Astoria city officials decided to do with the Bear Creek Watershed. Officials at the Oregon Department of Forestry, in charge of the bulk of state forests, said they will be watching and learning from the experiment on the Elliott.

“ODF is open to forest carbon projects on the lands it manages, as long as it aligns with our other forest management goals,” Tim Hoffman, an agency spokesperson, said in an email. Among those goals is continuing to generating timber revenue.

But management plans for forests entered into markets last anywhere from 40 to 150 years, and even delayed harvests eventually get cut. Law’s research shows the potential for Oregon trees to grow for up to 500 years or more and still keep capturing and storing carbon. She said such trade-offs the market provides, protecting parts of forests in order to sell off other parts, can offer a level of protection to some ecosystems that is commendable. But such tradeoffs do less to help meet the urgency of solving climate change and reaching net-zero carbon emissions in the next 25 years.

“Spending carbon to capture carbon is not climate neutral. Climate protection is not climate neutrality,” she said. “The real core thing we want to do is to get landowners to not harvest their forests.”