Opinion: A step in the right direction

One of the focus areas of the New York State Climate Action Plan (CAP, climate.ny.gov/Our-Climate-Act/Draft-Scoping-Plan) — also referred to as the “Draft Scoping Plan” — is forestry. The sections focusing on NY state forests are of particular interest to me since I grew up in the Finger Lakes region and over the past thirty years have witnessed the declining health of our forests.

Although forests provide innumerable benefits to humans and nonhuman species alike, from water filtration and soil erosion prevention to providing food, shelter, and the oxygen we need to survive, our forests are facing multiple threats.

After decades of “high-grading” logging removed our healthiest, most vigorous trees from the gene pool, the remaining trees have been more easily weakened by disease and invasive insects, strained by extreme temperatures and precipitation due to climate change, and under further pressure as the expansion of human settlement pushes our remaining wildlife into smaller and smaller areas leading to problems such as deer overgrazing of native forest saplings.

The Climate Action Plan proposes to address these issues and help our forests and communities to be more resilient. We know that high-grading doesn’t make sense — from an ecological standpoint or an economic sustainability standpoint. Frankly, high-grading isn’t forest management — it’s forest degradation.

We need to rethink how we obtain the resources we want and need from the environment so that we still have a working, thriving forest even after we’ve taken what we need. And, perhaps, that might mean not taking everything we want. Through this plan, private landowners will be supported in implementing sustainable forest management and mitigation strategies through education and outreach, management plans that encourage multiple types of land use, equipment caches, and reimbursements.

Likewise, communities will be supported in protecting their forests, as many cities lack management plans that ensure the well-being of forests, and zoning ordinances often push forested and other lands to be subdivided.

I spoke with Peter Woodbury of Cornell who has worked for decades on NY’s forests about what we need to see in the Climate Action Plan.

He noted that “climate change is a very serious challenge, so we want an ‘all of the above’ approach. … For forests, this means managing forests so that they are growing and healthy, which includes harvesting methods as well as helping assure regeneration of tree seedlings to grow the future forest. It also means planting trees and encouraging natural regeneration on idle former agricultural lands, and whenever possible using wood products in place of products that have a lot of embodied greenhouse gas emissions, such as concrete and steel.”

What else does the CAP propose regarding NY forests? Here are a few other components of the plan:

• Incentivize managing forests for sequestering carbon out of our atmosphere;
• Smarter, more ecologically sound management practices — including promoting a high level of diversity within and among species, harvesting in such a way that leaves an intact ecosystem with trees of a variety of ages rather than even-aged monoculture tree crops;
• Implementation of restoration measures in degraded forests;
• Management of invasive species — to this end, you may see “strengthened regulations, inspection, and enforcement of wood packaging material and live plant imports,” with more harmful non-native invasive species listed, monitored, and managed.

Already, New York has put its money where its mouth is (blogs.cornell.edu/nyshemlockinitiative/) in terms of protecting tree species like the hemlock, which has been under threat from the Hemlock woolly adelgid. Hemlock trees play a crucial role in the ecosystems of which they are a part, maintaining cool waterways for our native brook trout and other salmonids, tempering the “flashiness” of flooding during particularly heavy rain events, and holding soil in place thus preventing erosion, among other benefits.

Climate change will impact all of us, and acting sooner rather than later will reduce the severity of those impacts. Excellent forest stewardship will bring us multiple co-benefits and greatly add to our resilience in the face of climate disruption. Public support for this approach means people in both our rural areas and our cities and towns will benefit substantially in the decades ahead.

Please join me in showing support for safeguarding our forests in the Climate Action Plan by submitting a public comment online (nyserda.seamlessdocs.com/f/DraftScopingComments) or via email to scopingplan@nyserda.ny.gov.

Ryan Kincaid is the Sustainable Finger Lakes Program Coordinator for Sustainable Tompkins (sustainabletompkins.org).