The importance of natural forest stewardship in adaptation planning in the United States

Abstract

Forests are critical to the planetary operational system and evolved without human management for millions of years in North America. Actively managing forests to help them adapt to a changing climate and disturbance regime has become a major focus in the United States. Aside from a subset of forests wherein wood production, human safety, and experimental research are primary goals, we argue that expensive management interventions are often unnecessary, have uncertain benefits, or are detrimental to many forest attributes such as resilience, carbon accumulation, structural complexity, and genetic and biological diversity. Natural forests (i.e., those protected and largely free from human management) tend to develop greater complexity, carbon storage, and tree diversity over time than forests that are actively managed; and natural forests often become less susceptible to future insect attacks and fire following these disturbances. Natural forest stewardship is therefore a critical and cost effective strategy in forest climate adaptation.

Natural forests for a safe climate: Enhancing ecosystem integrity, biodiversity and adaptive capacity for climate mitigation

“…Proponents of ecosystem preservation often borrow from the decarbonization argumentation and invoke the carbon storage potential of natural forests as a major illustration of their climatic importance. For example, the ground-breaking proforestation initiative in the United States emphasizes how much carbon unexploited natural forests can remove from the atmosphere if allowed to develop to their full ecological potential Faison et al, 2023).…”

Harnessing Natural Disturbances: A Nature-Based Solution for Restoring and Adapting Dry Forests in the Western USA to Climate Change

“…These trends continue despite millions of hectares of active fuel reduction (e.g., thinning) and fire suppression [8,9] and a similarly long history of failed efforts to stop or prevent bark-beetle outbreaks (e.g., [10]). Increasingly unsuccessful efforts to control large natural disturbances are leading to calls for new approaches to managing disturbances [8,11,12].…”

“…The call for new approaches [8,11,12] is a recognition of the crises and ecological surprises we now face in western USA dry forests from the increasing failures of the command-and-control hypothesis. There are many adverse consequences for tree populations, landscape heterogeneity, carbon storage, adaptation to climate change, community protection, and overall costs from command-and-control approaches (e.g., [13,14]) that could be avoided with an NbS (Table 1).…”

Re-appraisal of the global climatic role of natural forests for improved climate projections and policies

“…Proponents of ecosystem preservation often borrow from the decarbonization argumentation and invoke the carbon storage potential of natural forests as a major illustration of their climatic importance. For example, the ground-breaking proforestation initiative in the United States emphasizes how much carbon unexploited natural forests can remove from the atmosphere if allowed to develop to their full ecological potential (Moomaw et al, 2019;Faison et al, 2023).…”