Climate Smart Forest Stewardship: A natural climate solution
Natural climate solutions (NCS) represent strategies that promote either climate adaptation or mitigation using natural ecosystems or green infrastructure. Globally, forests and wetlands have the potential to offset large amounts of greenhouse gas emissions (especially carbon dioxide —CO2—) that are driving today’s climate change. In Massachusetts, forests currently remove (sequester) and store approximately 7% of our state’s annual CO2 emissions and have even greater untapped offset potential (Visit the resilient lands initiative to find out more). To meet this untapped potential, forest climate solutions will need to promote additional sequestration and storage while balancing the challenges of addressing forest health threats and adapting to climate change.
Forests are subject to many threats associated with the impacts of past land-use and current development. These impacts are limiting our forest’s ability to adapt to the impacts of climate change. However, it is possible to increase the resilience of conserved and working forests, while optimizing carbon storage and habitat quality, by selecting and implementing carefully designed forest stewardship practices.
Active and Passive Approaches
Climate smart forest stewardship takes both active and passive approaches to caring for the land. The Forest Climate Resilience Program has worked with a suite of partners to develop the following climate smart and wildlife friendly forest stewardship practices:
- Keep the Forests We Have – preventing forests from being converted to other uses and responding promptly to disturbances, as needed, so forests recover quickly
- Grow New Forests and Trees – planting trees to reforest areas that used to be forest, add future adapted species to current forests, and green towns and cities
- Reduce Stressors – address the negative impacts of invasive plants, deer browse, and forest pests and diseases
- Let Trees Grow – where stressors are minimal, species diversity is high, and trees are well matched with future conditions, letting the forest grow can store more carbon while developing old-growth habitat characteristics over time
- Shape the Future Forest – where the current forest has low capacity to recover from disturbance and is not well adapted to future conditions, silvicultural strategies can increase diversity, reduce climate vulnerabilities, and create more valuable wildlife habitat.
These strategies are typically most successful when blended together. Using more passive, hands-off approaches in healthy areas of forest that aren’t at risk and more active interventions when that’s not the case.
Learn about what you, your community, or your non-profit can expect from a Climate Smart Forest Stewardship project.
Community & Cultural Resilience: Climate Smart Forest Stewardship
The COVID-19 pandemic served as an example of how forests sustain communities in times of crisis. These areas of respite will be equally important as climate change continues to unfold, with the added benefit of buffering communities from the worst impacts of more frequent and extreme storms.
For all communities to benefit from the climate adaptive benefits of forests, such as flood resilience and cooler temperatures during heat waves, all people must have equitable access to forests. Forest access that helps to meet people’s recreational, cultural, ceremonial, and foraging needs will enable communities to be better prepared for climate change.
Indigenous people frequently have, and had, their access to forests and nature either disrupted or terminated. Implementing municipal policies, educational programming, and restorative public use strategies can help rectify these injustices. Working with Indigenous community members and organizations can help identify and address barriers to forest access. Equitable use of forestland represents an essential strategy of climate smart forest stewardship; if communities are not well prepared to cope with climate change, then the benefit of forest adaptation and mitigation is lost.
The Northern Institute of Applied Climate Science has co-developed a framework to integrate indigenous and traditional knowledge, culture, language and history into the climate adaptation planning process. Visit the Tribal Climate Adaptation Menu to learn more.
Responding to climate change: Climate Smart Forest Stewardship
Sustainable forestry has long been used as a tool to address forest stressors, originating in response to widespread deforestation and expanding in modern day to care for forests in a manner that considers recreation, water quality, and more. Climate change is making these practices even more critical.
Climate smart forest stewardship (which integrates considerations of climate vulnerability and forest carbon into sustainable forestry) can help us respond to climate change. This form of stewardship intentionally focuses on helping forests maintain their function under changing conditions and requires the integration of strategies that promote both adaptation and mitigation.
Planned Forest Climate Adaptation: This considers forest vulnerabilities to climate change and their compounding stressors and identifies strategies for helping the ecosystem to cope and continue to provide benefits to the environment, as well as to people. Ecosystem-based adaptation activities use a range of opportunities for sustainable management, conservation, and restoration. Adaptation can involve more intensive interventions (such as harvests that address key vulnerabilities and promote climate adapted species) or low intensity interventions (such as the strategic placement of forest reserves).
Forest Climate Mitigation: The intentional application of an approach or strategy to enhance the forest’s ability to absorb carbon dioxide and store carbon as biomass (e.g., tree trunks, plant leaves, roots, wood products, local wood products, etc.). Examples include expanding or enriching forests through understory planting (planting resilient trees in forests that are not adequately regenerating), waiting longer periods of time between harvests, strategic placement of forest reserves, or using local wood products in place of fossil fuel-based products such as plastic and concrete.
Choosing the best approaches for your forest
Forest climate adaptation and mitigation strategies can involve either intensive interventions or a more passive, hands-off approach. How do you choose the right approach for your forest?
- Consider the goals for the community’s forest or your personal woodlot:
- You might be more of a Forest Ally wanting to care for your woodlot in a way that provides diverse forest habitat conditions for wildlife and wood products;
- You might be more of a Forest Protector wanting to set aside healthy forestland for long term protection;
- And you may have many different goals for your forest, some of which may seem conflicting but can be balanced with some careful planning.
- The Caring For Your Woods: Setting Goals booklet offers additional landowner types and ideas for how you can set and prioritize goals.
- Talk through the goals for that land with a professional, such as a forester; and
- Get a stewardship plan to help uncover the vulnerabilities of the forest and identify solutions that help meet your goals.
Once you have considered all three of these steps, it is time to select the right strategies for your forest. It may be best to take a more active management approach in forests that aren’t doing well or that are vulnerable to future changes in climate. Passive approaches such as permanent forest reserves are often best in areas that are a healthy and/or a high priority for cultural or ecological conservation.
Either way, the decision must be made based on your forest goals and why you or your community are working to take care of the land. A combination of both passive and active forest management approaches is often the most sustainable.
Remember, you can be both a Forest Ally and a Forest Protector at the same time! Mixing active management strategies to care for unhealthy areas of your forests and setting aside healthy areas of your forest long-term is often a recipe for success.
Forest Ally: A Woodlands Approach
Description: A “Forest Ally” ethos may align with the values of many communities and family forests. Forest Allies value a reciprocal relationship with the forest and often take active management approaches (such as tree planting or resilience harvest) that help to steward a forest. Forest Allies may have a working forest where they harvest forest products to support their families and community, or they may manage specifically for benefits such as recreation, wildlife habitat, or climate resilience.
Ecological/Cultural reasoning: Active forest management allows for community and family forests to use sustainable forest management to address forest health concerns, while building the forest’s ability to recover from future threats (such as severe storms or invasive pests and disease). What the forest provides in return (such as lumber and medicinal plants) can also provide meaningful cultural, health, and economic benefits to communities and/or individuals.
Forest Ally Stewardship Practices
Avoid Forest Loss
Benefits: Supporting working forests and timber markets can help to keep forests as forests. Strategies that reduce/eliminate forest conversion help to maintain the suite of benefits forests provide
Tradeoffs: Working forests may not always be permanently protected; permanent protection strategies limit future land uses
Where to Start:
Respond to Disturbance
Benefits: Committing to responding to the most severe disturbances can avoid forest conversion or degradation and promote climate adaptation and mitigation
Tradeoffs: Interventions can be cost prohibitive; responding to disturbance represents an active, human intervention
Where to start:
Reforest
Benefits: Creating additional forest land provides a suite of benefits that are associated with forests
Tradeoff: Reforestation removes land from other land uses
Where to start:
Plant Trees to Increase Forest Stocking
Benefit: Planting trees in forests that can support additional trees can support young tree establishment and biodiversity
Tradeoffs: Tree planting may unintentionally impact natural regeneration; tree planting may not successfully address issues with deer eating forest regeneration
Where to Start:
Remove Invasive Vegetation
Benefits: Treating invasive species can help protect wildlife and support the establishment of young trees and plants
Tradeoff: Herbicides can impact soil health and wildlife, particularly with repeated use.
Where to Start:
Resilience/Transition Harvest
Benefit: Harvest can be used to support biodiversity, young tree regeneration, wildlife habitat, and climate adaptation
Tradeoffs: Harvest will temporarily lead to a less mature forest condition; harvests lead to a temporary carbon loss; harvests impact forest soils
Forest Protector: A Wildlands Approach
Description: A “Forest Protector” may value a wildlands approach to forest stewardship. A forest protector knows there is a difference between planned passive management and no management at all. Planned passive management involves the careful selection of practices (such as designating forest reserves in ideal locations or responding after a severe disturbance to avoid forest loss or degradation) based on an understanding of your forest, often provided by a Forest Stewardship Plan. Planned passive management offers benefits over a no management approach by supporting a right strategy-right place approach to forest stewardship. Forest stewardship planning does not always mean active management.
Ecological/Cultural reasoning: Planned passive management allows currently healthy forests to mature with little to no human intervention. This can have climate, wildlife, and human benefits while helping to appropriately allocate resources since we cannot, and should not, manage every acre of forest. Communities and individuals may value the aesthetic and recreational benefits of a hands-off approach to forest stewardship.
Forest Protector Stewardship Practices
Avoid Forest Loss
Benefits: Strategies that reduce/eliminate forest conversion help to maintain the suite of benefits forests provide
Tradeoffs: Permanent protection strategies that are too restrictive may limit the ability to respond to forest health issues; permanent Protection strategies limit future land uses and potentially cultural practices
Where to Start:
Respond to Disturbance
Benefits: Committing to responding to the most severe disturbances can avoid forest conversion or degradation and promote climate adaptation and mitigation
Tradeoff: Interventions can be cost prohibitive; responding to disturbance represents an active, human intervention
Where to Start:
Establish Forest Reserves
Benefit: Forest Reserves can be established in many forms from permanent protection to smaller scale stewardship plan designations. Small scale reserve designations can help support a diversity of forest conditions and prevent forest operations in hard to operate areas or intact forests that are successfully self-sustaining
Tradeoffs: Forest reserve designations can limit the number of options for responding to forest health challenges in the future; reducing harvest limits the available wood supply and can lead to harvest in less desirable areas or the use of fossil fuel substitutes; reserve designations in vulnerable forest areas are unlikely to help sustain healthy forests into the future
Increase Time Between Harvests
Benefit: Delaying planned harvests can allow forests to reach a more mature state maximizing the carbon that is locked away and then put into wood products. This strategy is passive in nature but allows for active interventions as the goals of the landowner require
Tradeoff: Eventual harvest will lead to a less mature forest condition; delaying harvest reduces the available wood supply and can lead to harvest in less desirable areas or the use of fossil fuel substitutes; eventual harvest represents an active human intervention
Forest Stewardship Climate Plans
Forest Stewardship Climate Plans place a particular emphasis on climate smart forest stewardship. These plans focus on your forest’s vulnerability to climate change and prioritize recommendations that help your forest cope with these vulnerabilities, while also acting as a climate solution.
Forest Stewardship Climate Plans represent important, long-term planning documents that help you:
- Establish goals and objectives: What are the reasons you or your community owns and maintains forestland?
- Assess what climate change means for your woodlot(s), in terms of impacts and vulnerabilities to climate change and interconnected forest health risks.
- Understand how goals/objectives may need to be adjusted based on determined vulnerabilities.
- Identify practices that promote climate adaptation and mitigation, while meeting the community’s goals and objectives.
- Monitor your stewardship efforts over time and adjust as climate change unfolds.
Forest Stewardship Bird Plans
Forest Stewardship Bird Plans examine the available bird habitat in your forest and in surrounding properties and identifies opportunities to promote additional bird habitat in tandem with your goals for your forest.
Forest Stewardship Bird Plans represent important, long-term planning documents that help you to:
- Establish goals and objectives: What are the reasons you or your community owns and maintains forestland?
- Consider the current availability of bird habitat within your forest and nearby forests.
- Understand how you can support birds and other wildlife, while meeting all the other goals you have for your forest.
- Identify practices that promote quality habitat for birds and other wildlife.
- Monitor your stewardship efforts over time and adjust as the forest changes.
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Forest Stewardship Funding
No matter what goals you might have for your forest, there are a number of programs that can provide financial support and assistance.