Climate Change Stabilization
Our organization has developed science-based strategies to help lessen and prepare forest ecosystems and people for the unavoidable impacts of climate change. We use the best available science to formulate and promote sound management policies. Our focus is on clean water, wildlife and fish, and carbon storage.
Together the U.S. Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management oversee close to 195 million acres of forested lands. These publicly owned forests are highly valued as our “collective commons,” because they provide clean and abundant water, filter the air we breathe, absorb carbon dioxide, offer world-class recreation opportunities, anchor soils against erosion and flooding, and provide critical habitat for endangered fish and wildlife.
For decades the Pacific Northwest has taken center stage in debates concerning logging, primarily on federal lands. In particular, controversial logging of mature and old-growth forests began in earnest during the post-WW II logging and housing booms. In just five decades, logging had reduced the region’s irreplaceable old forests to 15-20 percent of their historic range.
By the 1990s, high rates of logging on National Forests and Bureau of Land Management (BLM) lands resulted in the listing of the northern spotted owl as a federally threatened species. Additional concerns over the viability of hundreds of other old-forest dependent species ushered in the Northwest Forest Plan in 1994, which greatly slowed logging on federal lands.
America’s National Forest roadless areas are a biological oasis for wildlife and plant communities and an important source of clean, cold water. The forests and other ecosystems within them perform vital services needed not only by fish and wildlife, but by all Americans as they cleanse the air we breathe and purify the water we drink.
With over half the nation’s roadless areas at mid to upper elevations (5,000 to 8,000 feet), they encompass the headwaters of hundreds of streams that feed municipal drinking water supplies. These concentrations of mature and old growth forests and undeveloped landscapes are also important to fish migration and rearing, and they provide a buffer against invasive species.
While tropical rainforests have garnered worldwide support for protection, temperate and boreal (high latitude) rainforests have been largely ignored. These forests are found in just ten regions of the world, with large expanses in the United States and Canada. This fall, we will release a new book that chronicles the importance of these rainforests - Temperate and Boreal Rainforests of the World: Ecology and Conservation, published by Island Press.
