No abstract

Responsible stewardship of temperate forests can address key challenges posed by climate change through sequestering carbon, producing low-carbon products, and mitigating climate risks. Forest thinning and fuel reduction can mitigate climate-related risks like catastrophic wildfire. These treatments are often cost prohibitive, though, in part because of low demand for low-value wood “residues.” Where treatment occurs, this low-value wood is often burned or left to decay, releasing carbon. In this study, we demonstrate that innovative use of low-value wood, with improved potential revenues and carbon benefits, can support economical, carbon-beneficial forest management outcomes in California. With increased demand for wood residues, forest health–oriented thinning could produce up to 7.3 million (M) oven-dry tonnes of forest residues per year, an eightfold increase over current levels. Increased management and wood use could yield net climate benefits between 6.4 and 16.9 million tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent (M tCO2e) per year when considering impacts from management, wildfire, carbon storage in products, and displacement of fossil carbon-intensive alternatives over a 40-y period. We find that products with durable carbon storage confer the greatest benefits, as well as products that reduce emissions in hard-to-decarbonize sectors like industrial heat. Concurrently, treatment could reduce wildfire hazard on 4.9 M ha (12.1 M ac), a quarter of which could experience stand-replacing effects without treatment. Our results suggest that innovative wood use can support widespread fire hazard mitigation and reduce net CO2 emissions in California.

Improved forest management (IFM) has the potential to remove and store large quantities of carbon from the atmosphere. Around the world, 293 IFM offset projects have produced 11% of offset credits by voluntary offset registries to date, channeling substantial climate mitigation funds into forest management projects. This paper summarizes the state of the scientific literature for key carbon offset quality criteria—additionality, baselines, leakage, durability, and forest carbon accounting—and discusses how well currently used IFM protocols align with this literature. Our analysis identifies important areas where the protocols deviate from scientific understanding related to baselines, leakage, risk of reversal, and the accounting of carbon in forests and harvested wood products, risking significant over-estimation of carbon offset credits. We recommend specific improvements to the protocols that would likely result in more accurate estimates of program impact, and identify areas in need of more research. Most importantly, more conservative baselines can substantially reduce, but not resolve, over-crediting risk from multiple factors.

From 2016 to 2019, the Indian Pradhan Mantri Ujjwala Yojana (PMUY) distributed over 80 million liquefied petroleum gas (LPG) stoves, making it the largest clean cooking program ever. Yet, evidence shows widespread continued use of the traditional chulha, negating the potential health benefits of LPG. Here we use semi-structured interviews with female and male adults to understand the drivers of LPG usage in Mulbagal, Karnataka, the site of a proto-PMUY program. We find that respondents perceive the main value of LPG to be saving time, rather than better health. We also find that norms of low female power in the household, in addition to costs, delay saving for and ordering LPG cylinder refills. Namely, female cooks controlled neither the money nor the mobile phone required to order a timely refill. These factors together contribute to the ‘refill gap’: the period of non-use between refilling cylinders, which may range from days to even months. Our work reveals how gender norms can amplify affordability challenges in low-income households.