Climate Change and Forests: Emerging Policy and Market Opportunities

Chapter 19. Using Forests and Farms to Combat Climate Change: How Emerging Policies in the United States Promote Land Conservation and Restoration

Forests, grasslands, and agricultural lands across the United States play an integral role in sequestering carbon dioxide emissions. Estimates for 2005 show that this carbon “sink” absorbs 780 million metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent each year, equal to approximately 11 percent of 2005 U.S. greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. However, development and other land conversion activities have caused this carbon sink to decrease by more than 14 percent since 1990.1 Including land-use offset opportunities in U.S. state, regional, and federal marketbased GHG emission reduction programs could be an effective way to create incentives to protect and rehabilitate these valuable carbon sinks. In addition, including offsets can increase the flexibility and cost-effectiveness of these programs , thereby lowering program compliance costs and facilitating quicker and potentially greater emission reductions. In this chapter we provide an overview of existing and emerging policies at the state, regional, and federal levels in the United States that create incentives for land management, conservation, and restoration activities that will reduce greenhouse gas emissions and sequester carbon. Although most of these policies are still under development or in the early stages of implementation, they offer evidence of the direction in which the policy debate is headed in the United States. We evaluate the design of these regulatory offset programs and explore the ways in which they promote the benefits and address the challenges associated with land Using Forests and Farms to Combat Climate Change: How Emerging Policies in the United States Promote Land Conservation and Restoration cathleen kelly, sarah woodhouse murdock, jennifer mcknight, and rebecca skeele 19 275 conservation and restoration. We also review several voluntary climate change programs that have helped set precedents for the inclusion of land-use offsets in mandatory climate change programs and could potentially be linked to such programs in the future. The Importance of U.S. Land Conservation, Management, and Restoration for Carbon Mitigation Forests, grasslands, and agricultural lands represent about 79 percent of all land cover in the United States.2 Implementing a variety of management activities on this land could greatly increase its capacity to absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. These activities include afforestation and reforestation, sustainable forestry practices, the implementation of conservation tillage on existing cropland , increased harvest rotations, and selective thinning. If employed effectively, such land management practices would serve to maintain and possibly expand the United States’ carbon sink capacity over the next 50 to 100 years.3 A 2006 study published by the Pew Center on Climate Change analyzed the potential for increased carbon sequestration through such activities.4 The results suggested that if a carbon payment of up to U.S.$12.50 per metric ton of CO2 were available, then 47 million hectares of marginal agriculture land in the United States would be converted to forest, and an additional 270 million metric tons of carbon dioxide would be sequestered annually for the next 100 years.5 This would offset nearly 20 percent of current U.S. carbon dioxide emissions generated from the combustion of fossil fuels. This scenario represents nearly one-third of current cultivated cropland and therefore admittedly is overambitious. But at the same carbon payment, according to the Pew study, even a less drastic change in land management, such as the modification of current agricultural practices, could result in the annual sequestration of up to 70 million metric tons of carbon dioxide. This study demonstrated the important role that land use could play in the effort to stabilize GHG concentrations in the atmosphere. Potential Benefits of Including Land-Based Offsets in Climate Legislation Including offset opportunities in market-based climate change programs would increase the programs’ flexibility and lower compliance costs. Land management and conservation offsets can increase the likelihood that market-based GHG programs will successfully decrease emissions over time in a cost-effective manner while generating additional environmental, social, and economic benefits. Specifically , improved land management and conservation offsets are beneficial for the following reasons. 276 c. kelly, s. w. murdock, j. mcknight, and r. skeele First, they produce real, measurable, and verifiable emission reductions and increased carbon sequestration. Reliable, proven, and accurate methods for measuring , monitoring, and verifying the carbon sequestration of land management and conservation activities are already in widespread use. Methods for measuring and monitoring terrestrial carbon pools, based on commonly accepted principles of forest inventory, are well established and tested. Third-party verification...