The U.S.’s logging plans show it’s easier to make climate promises than to keep them

This article originally appeared on Inside Climate News. It is republished with permission. Sign up for its newsletter here.

The U.S. Center at the COP27 climate talks in Sharm El-Sheikh, Egypt, hosted a panel Monday focused on ending global deforestation by 2030, but the reality on the ground in our nation’s forests looks quite different. Just hours before the discussion, conservation groups released a report showing that federal agencies are considering multiple logging projects, including on about 370,000 acres with mature and old-growth trees that remove planet-heating carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

The latest discussions came a year after 145 countries, including the United States, signed the Glasgow Leaders’ Declaration on Forests and Land Use, pledging to conserve forests and accelerate their restoration to slow global warming. But U.S. plans to log federal lands show it’s easier to make nonbinding climate promises than to keep them.

Forests are a crucial part of slowing the buildup of atmospheric greenhouse gases because they have the potential to remove up to one-third of human emissions of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, according to a 2019 report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. But the recent increase in wildfires as well as research on forest health suggest that those calculations may not be accurate. Some stressed and overheated forests could soon emit more carbon than they store.

The panelists at Monday’s session talked about “leveraging investments” and “catalyzing partnerships” to boost a vast global carbon accounting system by which wealthy regions or countries can continue to emit greenhouse gases by paying others to maintain forests that take them out of the atmosphere.

The Paris Agreement recognizes forests as important carbon sinks for such offset programs, said Prakash Kashwan, who researches environmental and climate justice, climate governance, and decolonizing conservation at Brandeis University.

“Forests are believed to be among the cheapest sources of carbon offsets,” he said, “though such a characterization is grossly misleading because it doesn’t account for the social and ecological impacts of maintaining forests as a sort of carbon sink. Even so, it doesn’t look like forests can escape the encroachment of carbon markets.”

He said forest-based carbon offsets should generally be used only within national boundaries in countries with good forest management to ensure that the accounting is reliable and transparent.

Forests in the Global South are unreliable sources of greenhouse gas reductions for offsets because of the lack of good management and enforcement, Kashwan said, which means that there “is a much greater chance of producing spurious credits.” And in countries in the Southern Hemisphere where governments control most of the forests, the odds are high for corruption, he added.

“Most importantly, most forests in the Global South have the presence of Indigenous peoples and other rural populations whose traditional rights in these lands have either not been recognized or, even if legally recognized, those rights are openly flouted by government forestry agencies because of the influx of conservation-related funds, and now carbon offset funds,” Kashwan explained, noting that there have been gross violations of human rights and land rights.

Kashwan pointed to his own research, suggesting that “at the least, 750 million to 1 billion people are victims of precarious forestland rights.” Another study he cited showed that forest restoration prioritization maps are focused on areas with high rates of poverty and lack of democratic institutions. The research indicates that the top-down approach “will threaten some robust ecosystems and food security because it assumes that smallholder agriculture is cheap and inefficient, and worth replacing with forests grown for the sake of carbon and biodiversity.”

Forests as Commodities

Commodifying forests as a climate solution is an approach that has failed in the past few decades and is probably doomed to fail in the future, said Jean Su, energy and justice director and senior attorney with the Center for Biological Diversity, part of the Climate Forests coalition that compiled the new report on planned logging projects in the U.S. The coalition is pushing the Biden administration to develop a national rule covering federal lands to protect old-growth and mature forests.

“I think what was missing was talk about Indigenous rights, about human rights issues, about the spiritual values and the majesty of forests,” Su said. “It very quickly became a market story, that we don’t value forests enough . . . and so in that way, they’re still trying to commodify forests. That has been the problem with this approach to forest protection, that everything has to be boiled down to a dollar amount. What we need instead are full bans—and enforceable bans—on deforestation, very similar to fossil fuels.”

In 2021, the tropics alone lost about 43,000 square miles of forest cover, an area the size of Tennessee, said panelist Craig Hanson, executive vice president for programs at the World Resources Institute. Additionally, in the U.S. wildfires burned across an Indiana-size swath of land, about 35,000 square miles, including some forests being used as carbon offsets by major U.S. corporations. Wildfires in Siberia that year burned up another 72,000 square miles, an area a bit larger than Oklahoma. Altogether, wildfires emitted 6,450 megatons of carbon dioxide in 2021, about equal to total European Union CO2 emissions from fossil fuels that year.

If world leaders want to take their forest pledges seriously, Su said, it’s time to move beyond market-based mechanisms and beyond using forests as carbon offsets.

“That is a scheme that has never worked to achieve deep decarbonization,” she said. “The best thing that we can do is ditch these market mechanisms, to stop talking about commodification of forests, and start actual protection. What we’re asking for from a domestic standpoint is, President Biden, if you want to live up to your global pledge, start at home.”

Disconnect Between U.S. Words and Actions

Su said there’s a “huge disconnect” between what the Biden administration is saying at COP27 about the U.S. leading on the global conservation pledge and what’s being done at home.

“We need Biden’s agencies to actually start becoming aligned with what President Biden is saying,” she said. “Please start at home, at the very least, and stop the logging that’s occurring, breaking up ecosystems, and killing carbon sequestration.”

In April, on Earth Day, Biden issued an executive order that would “conserve our forests that do so much to protect us,” he said. “You know, our forests are our planet’s lungs. They literally are recycling and cycling CO2 out of the atmosphere.”

But Su cautioned that all plans to protect forests are dependent on quickly cutting CO2 emissions from burning fossil fuels. Forest protection policies are “in a very different category from the causal factors of the climate emergency,” she said, noting that forests won’t be able to sequester carbon if we keep pumping out the fossil fuels. “They’re looked at in silos as different solutions. But ultimately, the way to save forests is just to stop fossil fuels because they are diminishing our forests and burning them down.”

Dawn Sturdevant Baum, general counsel for the Yurok Tribe in Northern California, which sells carbon credits under California’s sometimes controversial cap-and-trade program, said during the panel’s discussion that using satellites for careful monitoring of forests can help ensure their value for offsets.

The Yurok Tribe is developing its own capacities to make detailed scans of forests with airborne lasers to ensure that they are protected as promised, she said, adding, “We’re always very concerned about data and owning our own data and controlling who gets to see it because there can be sensitive information, about sacred sites, things that maybe we don’t want widely publicly broadcasted.”