Climate change and the Timber Industry: Impacts and Solutions

Past posts on this blog have covered such topics as the emerging forest carbon market, effects of climate change in the Sierra Nevada, and, most recently, the importance of biomass utilization.  This post aims to combine each of these topics to provide some outlook of the current and future economic status of our timberlands.

The California Climate Change Center recently posted a white paper on the Impact of Climate Change on California Timberlands (August 2009), which presents some staggering facts about California’s failing timber market.  In the paper, researchers develop models that show how timberlands will be affected by different climate change scenarios, provided with an economic analysis of different harvest and landowner adaptation strategies.  Production of timber is decreasing due to an era of global warming, increased wildfires, and changes in land use.  Climate change is impacting timber production already, and will continue to do so if the future warming projections are accurate.  California has already experienced a 24% decline in timber production from 1991 to 1996, and another 24% since then.   Early implementation of climate-smart forest management strategies is imperative to the survival and prosperity of our region’s timber production industry.

Forests of the Sierra Nevada are expected to experience many detrimental changes, due to changes in the climate.  The paper notes that globally, northern softwood forests will most likely see increased productivity because of warmer temperatures.  This increase in global product will further decrease local timber prices, continuing the downward trajectory of value.  Under likely price scenarios, climate change will result in an overall decline in the value of harvested timber, resulting in losses of up to $8.1 billion by the end of this century.  These decreases in timber value will increase the likelihood of changes in land use, resulting from the disparity in land values.  Timber value changes varied across the state, with strong decreasing timber values in high-growth Sierra Nevada areas where market dynamics already favor non-forest uses (most notably Nevada, Placer, and El Dorado County), providing the highest risk of rapid conversion of privately held timber land.

Not only is timberland productivity altered by economic factors, but can also be heavily influenced by environmental factors.   Environmental changes resulting from a changing climate, for example declining snowpack, will increase the occurrence of drought, eventually increasing the outbreak of wildfires, pests, and pathogens.  Temperature changes will also cause species to shift upslope where ranges will shrink due to the smaller amount of area at upper elevations.  Pest ridden trees, catastrophic wildfire, and shrinking populations will greatly threaten the future productivity potential of our forestlands.

Fortunately, the paper provides some hope through adaptation strategies which could be used to mitigate these effects.   Modeling showed that management options significantly influence the degree of loss of productivity.  Lands  in which the forest owners implemented management strategies that anticipate the effects of climate change and internalized those predictions into rotation and species composition decisions fared better than those who took a naïve approach, maintaining current harvest regimes.

The paper also addresses the impact of a carbon market on the effects of climate change on private forestlands, providing an estimate of the degree to which the presence of the carbon market can mitigate the economic impacts of climate change.   Models showed that the presence of a carbon market indeed lessens the impact of climate change on forests state-wide, but does so most significantly in the Sierra Nevada counties.

These findings provide the basis necessary to consider policy tools that lessen the impact of climate change, especially on land use conversion.  Implementation of a carbon market helps generate income in areas suffering the greatest timber value declines, providing an incentive to keep land in forest.  The paper also mentions other tools that favor timberland retention: tax relief or incentives, land conservation strategies, or actions that draw development to other areas.  SBC has already begun implementing several of these tools through programs aimed to help our region adapt to and mitigate the effects of climate change in the Sierra Nevada.  SBC is doing this by partnering with the Northern Sierra Partnership, consulting and encouraging communities to consider smart-growth land-use planning strategies, and by developing forest carbon projects through the Sierra Nevada Carbon Cooperative.  SBC’s biomass utilization efforts also fall in line with the necessary mitigation and adaptation strategies, providing a tool for healthy forest management which reduces greenhouse gases in a number of ways.

The first steps that need to be taken include outreach to community leaders, decision makers, and forest land owners about adaptation strategies, implications, and policy needs related to forest management. Initiating these conversations and partnerships today will protect the region’s timber industry of tomorrow.