Forest policy and management approaches for carbon dioxide removal

Abstract

Forests increasingly will be used for carbon dioxide removal (CDR) as a natural climate solution, and the implementation of forest-based CDR presents a complex public policy challenge. In this paper, our goal is to review a range of policy tools in place to support use of forests for CDR and demonstrate how concepts from the policy design literature can inform our understanding of this domain. We explore how the utilization of different policy tools shapes our ability to use forests to mitigate and adapt to climate change and consider the challenges of policy mixes and integration, taking a close look at three areas of international forest policy, including the Kyoto Protocol's Clean Development Mechanism, Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD+) and voluntary carbon offset markets. As it is our expertise, we then examine in detail the case of the USA as a country that lacks aggressive implementation of national climate policies but has potential to increase CDR through reforestation and existing forest management on both public and private land. For forest-based CDR to succeed, a wide array of policy tools will have to be implemented in a variety of contexts with an eye towards overcoming the challenges of policy design with regard to uncertainty in policy outcomes, policy coherence around managing forests for carbon simultaneously with other goals and integration across governance contexts and levels.

U.S. Family Forest Owners' Forest Management for Climate Adaptation: Perspectives From Extension and Outreach Specialists

“…Given these challenges, what are the best policy interventions to remove these barriers and facilitate active management for climate adaptation on family forest holdings? Because of the scale of their collective ownership, family forest owners are key players in adapting and maintaining forest cover in the face of climate change, as well as mitigating climate change through carbon dioxide removal (Goldfuss et al, 2020;vonHedemann et al, 2020). If maintaining existing forests is a national priority, which has been emphasized to the Biden Administration (Goldfuss et al, 2020), policies must be written or modified to target family forest owners and their specific needs.…”

“…The American Forest Foundation and The Nature Conservancy are currently piloting a program in Pennsylvania, Maryland, and West Virginia that facilitate smaller landowners receiving carbon payments (Family Forest Carbon Program, 2021). However, relying on forests to produce carbon offsets to mitigate climate change has also been criticized for not meeting actual mitigation goals, permitting the continuation of environmental injustices at the sources of emission, and prioritizing the ecosystem service of carbon sequestration to the detriment of other values associated with forests that are not monetized (Lindenmayer et al, 2012;Lejano et al, 2020;vonHedemann et al, 2020).…”

“…Extension as an institution also has the potential to monitor climate impacts and adaptation efforts and bridge spatial scales by coordinating across local adaptation initiatives, which are more difficult for individual landowners to do (Brugger and Crimmins, 2015). At the same time, however, extension has limitations: extension has been shown to have limited reach in Tribal and Hispanic communities (Hiller, 2005;Vásquez-León, 2009), an issue exacerbated by the fact that land grant universities that extension is associated with have been criticized for relying on stolen Indigenous lands for their founding and prosperity (Lee and Ahtone, 2020). Budget cuts have also reduced extension actors' ability to engage landowners (Brugger and Crimmins, 2015).…”

The future of carbon dioxide removal must be transdisciplinary

“…Policy incentives can address many of those challenges and facilitate more rapid scale-up of CDR. In the article ‘Forest policy and management approaches for carbon dioxide removal’ [13], Nicolena vonHedemann and colleagues discuss the public policy challenges associated with using forests as CDR and provide an overview of the opportunities. Focusing on forests, including reforestation, avoiding forest conversion, improved forest management and fire management, can provide up to 50% of the natural CDR potential in the USA [14].…”

Ecological Effect of Ecological Engineering Projects on Low-Temperature Forest Cover in Great Khingan Mountain, China

“…The New Zealand government announced the One Billion Trees (1 BT) program which aimed to plant one billion trees in the country by 2028 [3,5]. Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation plus (REDD+), as the best-known international forestry-based policy for carbon dioxide removal, was created by the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) Conference and aimed to implement schemes by national governments to reduce human impact on forests, an activity which results in greenhouse gas emissions at the national level [6].…”