Forests

Forests in the eastern United States appear to be growing faster than they should be, and increases in temperature and carbon dioxide are the likely culprits.

“We’ve known for 30 or 40 years that extra CO2 and extra temperature cause trees to grow, most of the climate models predict this,” said Geoffrey Parker, of the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center in Maryland. “It’s just that there haven’t been many field studies that really corroborated it.”

Parker’s team used a combination of two types of tree data to put together a comprehensive look at how trees along the western edge of the Chesapeake Bay have been growing in recent years. They found that the forest, including both young and old trees, has been adding weight at an exceptionally high rate. In fact, in 90 percent of the measurements taken, the rate of growth of the trees was higher than the expected rate.

As Congress continues to mull climate legislation, it seems increasingly likely that some form of offsets program will be included.

Allowing polluters to purchase credits that would offset a portion of their emissions would dramatically reduce the overall cost of a cap and trade program. But it could also reshape the country’s farmland, turning some farmers into forest managers.

The world’s forests are being damaged by climate change-related heat and drought, even in areas not traditionally known for water shortages, U.S. Geological Survey researchers say in the first global assessment of tree deaths from heat stress and drought.

The findings highlight the very real risk that tree mortality could become a bigger problem as global climate change progresses.

They also suggest that emissions offset programs designed to prevent logging and clear cutting of forests are missing the big picture: Allowing polluters to pay to preserve or plant trees rather than reduce their own greenhouse gas emissions may keep one area of trees alive, but it continues to endanger forests around the world.

Reporting from Barcelona, Spain

Developing nations could get paid billions to raze forests and build palm oil plantations in their place if current text in the Copenhagen climate treaty sticks, a group of advocates warned at the Barcelona climate talks today.

It's not set in stone. Governments could still reinsert a 10-word phrase requiring natural forest protection that got sliced from the treaty language, the nine-group Ecosystems Climate Alliance (ECA) explained in a statement.

They'll have to do it by Friday, though, the last day of the United Nations Barcelona talks.

At the United Nations this week, representatives of 85 governments, including 14 heads of state, assembled in a room to discuss how to change a world in which forests are worth more dead than alive.

Deforestation accounts for 20% of global greenhouse gas emissions — more than Europe emits, and more than all the world’s cars, trucks, boats and planes emit. Because trees absorb carbon, deforestation causes a large amount of the greenhouse gas to be released to the atmosphere and also prevents trees from continuing to absorb it.

A leading solution that the world leaders were discussing is REDD, Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation, a UN program that would give people in developing countries a financial incentive to preserve their forests and, in the process, immediately begin reducing the world’s carbon emissions.

While environmental advocates still have serious concerns about high carbon emitters abusing the system and simply buying forest credits to avoid making their own emissions cuts, the idea behind REDD is popular and could be adopted in December at the international climate change talks in Copenhagen. However, many in the room noted that while plenty of countries verbally expressed support in expanding REDD beyond the pilot stages, few had made the true commitment of devoting funding.

When the House Committee on Agriculture opens its hearing on climate legislation this afternoon, its chairman will be pushing another bill aimed at changing the government's biofuel rules. His arguments on behalf of ethanol have drawn the most attention, but the bill would also open federal forests for biomass production.

That effort is pitting agriculture interests against environmentalists – and it could hold up the climate bill.

Representing the environmentalist perspective is the National Resources Defense Council’s Nathanael Greene, who writes that the bill is an attempt by timber and agriculture interests to weaken “the safeguards designed to ensure that we don’t burn irreplaceable forests for energy.”

Tip O’Neil, former Speaker of the House of Representatives, once declared that “all politics is local”. The same might be said for climate change. While its consequences are global, its root cause is the greenhouse gas emissions each of us emits directly or indirectly from our vehicles, buildings and appliances.

If anthropogenic climate change is the result of the millions of energy decisions each of us makes in the course of our lives, then it stands to reason that the solution to climate change lies in making those decisions differently. Each us must sign a treaty with ourselves, a personal Kyoto Protocol. Without that individual commitment, no international agreement to mitigate global warming will be worth the recycled paper it’s written on.

This point came home recently when I met a woman named Clare Dakin in London. Clare is the UK’s representative for a program called Project Green Hands. Its objective is to reverse the desertification of Tamil Nadu, the seventh most populous state in India, by planting 114 million trees within the next 10 years.

So far, six million trees have been planted by 1 million people in three years, including 850,000 in a single day, a Guinness Book world record. The people who plant the trees are volunteers who each pledge to care for a single sapling for two years.