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:
John Rogers
The California regulatory environment is a clear indication that the people of California value forestland for much more than its ability to produce timber. We also value the services that forests provide: clean water, wildlife habitat, open space, and the feeling of respite we experience when we look out over a well-managed unbroken forested landscape and imagine… that something is still right with the world. But, how much do we value them? We expect local ranchers and timberland owners to pay their taxes, provide local jobs, and to maintain stream conditions that support healthy salmon populations. But, we only want to pay them for raising timber and cattle—not for raising salmon… or murrelets, or owls.
Economists call the services provided by our forests ecosystem services. From an economist’s perspective the central problem is that there is no existing market for these services. We know it costs money to provide or preserve them, but without markets how do we estimate the value of specific ecosystem services? As the concept of payments for ecosystem services becomes mainstream—with emerging markets for carbon storage leading the way—it becomes increasingly important for forest stakeholders to understand, well… what’s at stake.
At ISF’s Future Forests working session last fall a broad cross section of Humboldt County’s forest stakeholders stopped talking about California’s regulatory climate long enough to spend a day focused on a shared goal: to maintain a healthy and productive working forest landscape on the North Coast. Presentations at the session identified increasing land values as a serious economic challenge for owners and buyers hoping to manage forestland on a truly sustainable basis. As land values increase it is also increasingly difficult for landowners to justify investments in sustainable forest management based solely on the income from harvesting timber.
Payments for ecosystems services such as clean water, habitat, and carbon storage may enable timberland owners to prioritize conservation objectives in their forest management practices and to protect larger forested parcels from subdivision and fragmentation. But, if these tools are to serve the north coast they can’t be developed by economists and state policy wonks in a closet. We – the people of the north coast – conservationists and landowners, timber workers and environmentalists, ecologists and business owners – need to understand these concepts to protect our working forests and our quality of life. We need to help create, shape and advocate for the policy instruments and mechanisms that will build the markets, and make the payments, for the ecosystem services that we value on the north coast.
For more information on the discipline of ecological economics and the
emerging potential markets for ecosystem services please visit ISF’s
website at http://newforestry.org/ecosystemservices/
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
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Institute
for Sustainable Forestry
PO Box 1580
Redway, CA 95560
newforestry.org