Copyright 2000, The Seattle Times
November 18, 2000
By Eric Sorensen, The Seattle Times

Swinging in an open gondola some 20 stories above the forest floor, David Shaw can see the blue-green tops of 500-year-old firs, distant swatches of morning fog and a glimpse of the future.

All around him — deep in the roots, in the duff of the floor, on the construction crane hoisting him above the Earth — instruments measure the forest's every breath.

Carbon dioxide comes in, oxygen goes out.

Scientists are trying to find out whether forests like this 6-acre patch can lower levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere — and possibly reverse the trend of global warming.

Forests, through photosynthesis, draw carbon dioxide out of the air, creating wood cells with the carbon and releasing oxygen back into the atmosphere. Clearing a forest releases some carbon back into the atmosphere as the wood is processed and the logging debris is burned or decays. That carbon joins carbon dioxide from power plants, automobiles and even natural-gas furnaces to trap heat and warm the atmosphere.

World leaders are now gathered in the Netherlands to discuss the role of forests in the 1997 Kyoto agreement to reduce greenhouse gases during the next decade and beyond.

One idea under consideration is a system of national and international markets where "carbon credits" can be bought and sold. In theory, a Midwest utility could offset the amount of carbon dioxide it emits by paying a Pacific Northwest landowner to grow more trees.

But if credits are to work, scientists will need to create a way to count a forest's carbon.

"The major tool that we're talking about here is accurate accounting," said Jerry Franklin, a University of Washington forest ecologist and program director of the crane facility, which is run by the UW and the U.S. Forest Service.

The Thornton T. Munger Research Natural Area in the Gifford Pinchot National Forest borders eerily on the unnatural.

Yes, it is a mint-condition old-growth forest, with western hemlocks and Douglas firs towering more than 200 feet above the cool, dark forest floor.

But topping the trees is a $1.2 million construction crane more appropriate over downtown Seattle. Every tree thicker than a wrist is tagged and mapped. Paths are covered with walks of recycled plastic, minimizing the impact of researchers' footfalls on the forest's carbon content. For the same reason, researchers carry bottles if they don't want to leave a study site for a bathroom break.

Meanwhile, the forest is wired like a patient in intensive care.

Yard-long tubes called mini-rhizotrons — video cameras and fiber-optic cables used to measure fine root growth — rise out of the ground. Small funnels on the ground and along the crane tower measure carbon-dioxide levels.

"We probably don't want to hang around here too long," said Shaw, site director of the Wind River Canopy Crane research facility, as he stood near one of the carbon-dioxide sensors, "particularly if you're breathing heavy."

Researchers each night can watch the carbon-dioxide levels rise on the forest floor as organic matter breaks down, then drop during the day as leaves photosynthesize.

They can't say how many leaves are in this forest, but they figure they cover the study site more than eight times over.

To be sure, this is new scientific territory. Just last week, British researchers writing in the journal Nature reported that global warming can ultimately impair the ability of ocean and land ecosystems to serve as carbon-storing "sinks."

Their computer models predict that if warming continues, increased decay will cause forests and soils to actually become net producers of carbon by 2050 and warm the atmosphere even further.

The National Institute for Global Environmental Change, which is funded by the U.S. Department of Energy, has 12 projects on the Carson site. While the focus is on the flow of carbon in old growth, knowledge gleaned here will help predict the flux of carbon through the life of a forest, said Tom Suchanek, western regional director for the institute.

"Once we do that, we will know how much of a source or a sink that represents to the atmosphere," he said.

The nation's forests sequestered 310 million metric tons of carbon last year — roughly one-fifth the amount emitted by the United States, according to the Pacific Forest Trust, a forest stewardship and conservation organization."Forests are the most significant, expandable long-term future carbon reservoirs or sinks in the U.S.," said the privately funded trust in a recent report whose contributors included the UW's Franklin.

The United States accounts for one-fourth of the world's carbon-dioxide production, but because it has such a vast land area, its forests can in theory soak up huge amounts of carbon and go a long way toward compensating for those emissions.

Northwest forests can be a big player. They have a remarkable potential for storing carbon because of abundant moisture and temperatures that let them grow year-round. But when they're cut, burned or otherwise disturbed, they can also release huge amounts of carbon.

So far, they've been a net contributor to the stream of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, the trust report said.

They account for about a quarter of a percent of the world's forests, but losses to logging and development have contributed nearly 1.5 percent of the global carbon flux, according to the land trust.

A century's worth of logging on forests released between 1.6 and 1.9 billion tons of carbon, said Mark Harmon, a forest ecologist at Oregon State University.

Pacific Northwest forests could recover more than half that in about 50 years if timber harvesters left more trees when cutting, waited longer between harvests and did not burn dead trees and logs, he said.

According to the Pacific Forest Trust report, forests are currently harvested every 35 years or so. Average rotations for Weyerhaeuser, for example, range from 35 years in the southeast United States to between 45 and 50 years in the Northwest.

But with a rotation of 90 years, the trust said, a forest can more than double its carbon-storage capacity and still produce some income through occasional thinning.

Carbon credits would be another source of income.

They would also help wildlife, water quality and other environmental values, said Laurie Wayburn, president of the Pacific Forest Trust.

"If you have a carbon market, you create new capital for stewardship, new capital for conservation," she said.

Carbon credits work by paying landowners to keep a certain amount of carbon in long-term or permanent storage. Utility companies or heavy industry can then buy those credits to offset their carbon-dioxide emissions.

The market for carbon credits is extremely speculative and in its infancy. The credits do not exist under federal law.

But some companies are negotiating to buy them in case a market emerges through U.S. law or negotiations over the Kyoto protocol. The 1997 treaty would have the United States reduce carbon-dioxide emissions by 7 percent of 1990 levels between 2008 and 2012.

Even without an adopted international agreement on carbon credits, the international brokerage house Cantor Fitzgerald announced the launch of CO2e.com, a Web site specializing in greehouse-gas emissions trading.

Last week, the Pacific Forest Trust sold carbon rights from 5,000 acres of old growth in California and Oregon to the Green Mountain Energy, a Texas electricity marketer. The carbon credits — worth $6,000 a year — will account for about half the carbon dioxide emitted by the company's heat, electricity, business travel, employee commuting and the energy used to create paper for office use and direct mail.

"This is a business that is interested in operating in a way that is truly sustainable," said Tom Rawls, chief environmental officer for Green Mountain. "In our judgment, that means it's essential to reduce our environmental footprint, and at this point in our world's history, reduce our carbon footprint."

Roughly $100 million has exchanged hands worldwide in the past year through carbon sales at costs ranging from 50 cents to $20 per ton of carbon, said Zach Willey, a senior economist for Environmental Defense, which has been working on establishing carbon contracts around the Northwest.

The sum, Willey said, "is nothing compared to what it could be."

Oregon's Confederated Tribes of the Warm Springs is investigating carbon credits as a way to afford a shift from "industrial strength forestry" to more sustainable practices on its 640,000-acre reservation.

"It's our intent to be here forever," said Bodie Shaw, tribal member and assistant forest manager overseeing nearly 400,000 acres of woodlands.

"With that in mind, how do we interact with the land around us?"

But a host of issues needs to be resolved, including how to determine the amount of carbon stored in a given forest.

On its western border along the Cascade crest, the tribal forest averages 110 inches of rain a year. That drops to 40 inches just a few miles eastward into the rain shadow. As rainfall declines, so does the forest's productivity and potential to store carbon.

The tribe, whose council has yet to weigh in on carbon credits, must also wrestle with the possible impact of reduced harvests on the tribal mill, which employs about 200 people.

And if a polluter is buying carbon credits, said Shaw, "that's great for the bank account, but are we in effect allowing them to pay us to pollute? Doesn't that go against our cultural beliefs?"

Some environmental groups, including the Sierra Club, have similar misgivings, preferring to see carbon-dioxide emissions reduced at their source.

Weyerhaeuser, which has 1.4 million acres of private working forest in Washington state alone, has yet to take a position on carbon credits.

"We're waiting and watching," said Kathy Budinick, environmental communications manager, "because there's not been enough information gleaned to understand the implications, sort of what the game is that can be played around this. There's just not enough information developed on the subject to understand the implications: What is a carbon credit? What is it worth?

"Some of the real basic questions around this have not been adequately formed." Error: Unable to read footer file.