Sierra Nevada Carbon Cooperative

At the turn of the twentieth century, John Muir noted that “everybody needs beauty as well as bread, places to play in and pray in where nature may heal and cheer and give strength to the body and soul,” a sentiment that must be taken to heart as much, if not more at the beginning of the twenty-first century. But while there is intrinsic and immeasurable value in the Sierra Nevada’s majestic landscapes, humankind depends on the region for more than spiritual renewal. Our mountainous region of raging rivers, splendid forests, and vast fields and valleys is a mosaic of ecological processes and properties. As plants grow and die, as the seasons change, as fire crackles through the understory, as predators cover vast distances in search of prey and as grazers nibble away, this mosaic of ecosystems is cycling nutrients like carbon, nitrogen, and phosphorous, producing soils, preventing erosion and stream sedimentation, purifying our air and water, and removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

This mosaic is like a tightly woven tapestry. It is strong enough to continue functioning even as some of its strands wear thin. But care of this tapestry and its components is of paramount importance. Unchecked development, overburdened septic systems, increasing water and energy use, over-extraction of resources, fire suppression, and global climate change jeopardize the integrity of this tapestry. These activities snip away at the strands holding it together, while requiring that it bear more weight.  The Sierra Nevada Carbon Cooperative is a project designed to strengthen the Sierra’s ecological tapestry.

The purpose of the Sierra Nevada Carbon Cooperative (SNCC) is to capture the opportunity for the Sierra Nevada to mitigate and adapt to climate change in a way that promotes ecological integrity and brings economic prosperity to the region. By reducing barriers to and risks of participating in emerging markets for ecosystem services, SNCC provides the scaffolding for Sierra landowners and conservation organizations to build revenue to protect and restore forestlands in the Sierra Nevada. By assessing the services provided by the healthy functioning of Sierra Nevada ecosystems, we can create reliable sources of revenue to pay for the stewardship and restoration of the region’s forestlands and the state’s upper watersheds.

One of the biggest threats to the future of the Sierra Nevada is global climate change. The ability of humans to design technology and innovative solutions to massive problems like this is remarkable. Certainly, technological advances will play a key role in helping us adapt to and mitigate the effects of climate change. At the same time, we have natural infrastructure and processes that function more effectively and more efficiently than anything we can engineer. Without maintaining nature’s own ability to deal with perturbations—without maintaining the integrity of forests to continue photosynthesizing and converting carbon dioxide into wood—we will lose these critical services that nature currently provides. The Pacific Forest Trust estimates that under a “business-as-usual” scenario, California will lose 170,000 acres of forestland between 2008 and 2020, resulting in 37 million metric tons of CO2 emissions. If we lose our forests to development and other land uses, we take away the earth’s ability to provide the processes we depend on.

Recognizing the importance of the state’s forests in combating climate change, the California Air Resources Board (ARB) set a goal in the June 2008 draft of the AB32 Scoping Plan, to achieve 5 million metric tons of CO2 emission reductions by 2020 “through sustainable [forest] management practices including reducing the risk of catastrophic wildfire, and the avoidance or mitigation of land-use changes that reduce carbon storage.” They assume that forests will play a greater (but unspecified) role in meeting 2050 targets.