News and updates from the
Institute for Sustainable Forestry
New Forestry News
ISF Updates:
Looking
to the Future
Events:
May 20th
ISF Spring Walkabout
Websites:
Cybelle Immitt / John Rogers
“In the Southern Humboldt region and across much of the Pacific Northwest forests are in varying stages of recovery from the lasting effects of high-impact logging operations. It is difficult to extrapolate from the existing information exactly how these forests looked before logging. We do know that until many decades have passed, second growth forests are particularly susceptible to catastrophic fire. With continuous fuels connecting the forest/meadow floor to the high canopy, wildfire can burn with extreme intensity… These intense wildfires also pose an ominous threat to rural landowners and homesteaders. Recent fires in the region remind us of the inevitability of fire.”
“As stewards of the land which will be our legacy, we must come to terms with fire as an elemental force which can cause destruction on a devastating scale or help us to create landscapes that are healthy, fire tolerant and rich with economic and biological niches.”
Peter Tittmann - SHFSC Homeowners Brochure
ISF recognizes the nexus between hazardous fuels modification to decrease the damaging effects of wildfires and forest restoration activities to improve the health of our forests. A key goal of the ISF is to work closely with the Southern Humboldt Fire Safe Council (SHFSC) on fire safety planning and hazardous fuel reduction projects in the Southern Humboldt area. To this end ISF supports the SHFSC in its efforts to fund and implement programs to reduce the risk of wildfire in and around local communities. ISF is also involved in the development of the Southern Humboldt Community Wildfire Protection Plan (CWPP). The CWPP planning process will provide a great opportunity to:
- increase homeowner firesafe preparedness,
- improve area firefighting capacity,
- plan a network of regional shaded fuel breaks, and
- help facilitate and develop a list of specific prioritized community projects.
Over the past century fire suppression combined with intensive forest management has led to increasingly dense vegetation. This increase in forest fuels threatens public health and safety, watersheds, and wildlife habitat with unacceptable losses to wildfire. Such losses can “have devastating results for watersheds…"
As California’s annual fire suppression costs continue to escalate the forest thinning, fuel breaks and fuels reduction projects funded through the CA Fire Safe Council provide a much needed preventative response to increasing fuel loads. Yet, income from the forest products generated by fuels reduction practices rarely approaches the cost of project implementation.
Nowhere is the disconnect between needed forest management practices and market pricing of forest products more evident than in the effort to reduce forest fuels and increase fire safety in California. Fuels reduction and forest thinning projects produce small and very small diameter materials. To decrease fire hazard these materials are commonly either burned or chipped on site. The products of fuels reduction work could provide fuel for electrical power generation facilities – and potentially offset project implementation costs – if market prices could support the added expense of transporting chip products to power generation facilities fueled by chip products.
As a response several recent and current research projects attempt to quantify the externalized benefits of generating electricity from forest thinnings and fuels management practices as opposed to current fossil fuels.
According to Greg Morris of the Green Power Institute:
Based on a base-case, conservative analysis, the value of the environmental services associated with biomass energy production in the United States is 11.4 ¢/kWh. Moreover, this value includes none of the desirable benefits of rural employment, rural economic development, and energy diversity and security provided by biomass energy production. (Morris 1999)
The USDA FS Pacific Southwest Research Station’s Biomass Life Cycle Assessment Project intends to carry this analysis further and quantify the costs and benefits associated with biomass energy production.
Many policy and decision makers agree that the social, economic, and environmental costs and benefits of biomass power need to be better understood. Public policy is hampered by lack of knowledge about the many costs and benefits associated with thinning forests and using the biomass from these treatments to generate electrical power.
The objective for the Biomass LCA Project is to develop a comprehensive economic, environmental, and energy LCA model that can be used to evaluate the potential net public benefits associated with treating and utilizing forest biomass.
(Biomass LCA Technical Summary 2005)
These projects are encouraging and will enable policy makers to make informed assessments of various policy options--to allocate resources appropriately. Investor tax credits and state level production commitments encourage the development and maintenance of biomass generators, but as yet these incentives do not apply to forest management or fuel reduction efforts.
ISF and SHFSC continue to monitor developments in biomass utilization technology. We look forward to the time when small scale distributed biomass power facilities can pay chip prices that fully offset the implementation costs of fuels reduction projects--but in outlying rural areas this reality is likely to be a few years down the road.
Forest
Fragmentation
Greg Blomstrom
Ecosystem
Services
John Rogers
Protecting
Working Forests
Richard Geinger
Forestry
and Fire Safety
Cybelle Immit / John Rogers
Working
Forest Bonds
An ISF proposal
Subscribe
to New Forestry News |
||
Institute
for Sustainable Forestry
PO Box 1580
Redway, CA 95560
newforestry.org