Forest Carbon Assessment and Management across Scales: Using Improved Forest Management for Climate Resilience and Mitigation

This project will discuss how to improve forest management to capture more carbon dioxide from the air, while considering challenges like different forest types and economic pressures.

Forestlands have the potential to support climate-change mitigation and adaptation solutions. Improved forest management (IFM) practices are a common strategy for enhancing carbon sequestration and storage within forests while minimizing the risk of disturbance-induced carbon loss. If properly designed and implemented, these practices have the potential to increase carbon storage while conserving other ecosystem services.

Unfortunately, concerns around issues such as additionality and leakage have resulted in polarized opinions about the legitimacy of carbon offsets and the use of IFM methods. The goal of this project is to support a balanced discussion around success and challenges in IFM design and implementation by highlighting important interactions between ecological and human dimensions at local to global scales.

Ecological contexts that may influence the suitability of IFM in addressing climate change include forest type, ecological zones, past management activities, site conditions, and susceptibility to natural and anthropogenic disturbances; while relevant human dimension contexts include existing cultural practices in forest management, competing market forces, risk of land use change, and state/federal policies that influence industry standards and the distribution of incentives. Since the capacity of forestlands and their owners to incorporate IFM approaches is heterogeneous across space public policy needs to account for a diverse array of local, regional, and global conditions when encouraging the use of IFM practices.

Future policies must also be informed by a comprehensive understanding of how forest carbon dynamics can meaningfully contribute to global carbon budgets. Such a challenge highlights the need for international and multidisciplinary collaboration. The goal of this project is to meet this need by facilitating an interactive forum, where a broad assemblage of experts across domains can coalesce to identify the current gaps, challenges, and strategies for successful IFM implementation. Ultimately, this project will combine knowledge from forestry, ecology, policy, and economic disciplines to develop new research avenues and collaborations for advancing the implementation of IFM practices at global scales.