Mitigating Climate Change with New England's Forests

Manomet Center for Conservation Sciences is working to better understand the best way for a forest to sequester (or store) carbon via a life-cycle analysis. It is an objective research approach to track carbon from "cradle to grave," or, from the time the carbon is taken out of the atmosphere until the time it goes back into the atmosphere.

We already know the climate will warm in this century as a result of greenhouse gases (GHGs) we put into the atmosphere in the last century. Averting a warming trend is not an option for us. Our goal now has to be to reduce the amount of warming. There are two ways to fight climate change: (1) reduce our emissions of GHGs, and (2) offset (or counteract) our emissions. We need both approaches.

We can reduce emissions by using less energy, and by developing non-fossil fuel energies, such as biomass, solar, wind, tidal, and nuclear. However, we will continue to rely on fossil fuels for a long time, and we will continue to add carbon dioxide (CO₂) to the atmosphere as a result of our energy needs.

To fight climate change we need to keep forests as forests. We also need to figure out how to use forests to sequester (or store) carbon from the atmosphere without compromising the many other benefits that forests provide, such as wildlife habitat and places for recreation.

There are three basic types of approaches to using forest to sequester carbon:

1. Afforestation: planting trees where they do not exist, such as in fields.
2. Avoided deforestation: preventing the conversion of forest to other uses, such as development, which usually leads to an emission of the carbon locked up in the trees. Forest conversion also precludes future carbon sequestration by trees at that site.
3. Sustainable forest management: increasing the capacity of managed forests to sequester carbon.

For more information about this project please contact:

John Hagan, Ph.D.
Phone: 207-721-9040
Email
Web: www.manometmaine.org

Forests provide many important benefits. Home to more than half of all species living on land, forests also help slow global warming by storing and seuestering carbon.

Classic New England foliage not only provides beauty, but is invaluable natural capital.