Module 4: Forest Carbon Removal
The oldest carbon removal trick in the book: TREES! Forests have substantial carbon removal potential but it comes with a suite of challenges from a lack of permanence, which is increasingly a problem as forests are increasingly susceptible to climate change driven impacts like wildfires and disease, to difficulty in measuring how much carbon is actually accumulating. This module will showcase companies like DroneSeed, Pachama, Silviaterra, and Living Carbon that are applying innovative tech to improve forest-based CDR, and will highlight the complexity of the challenges left to overcome.
High Flyer
Carbon 180
This overview of the use of trees in removing carbon from the atmosphere covers critical concepts from key terms to policy to cost and environmental justice concerns. Pay special attention to the glossary, and get ready to dig further into everything you read here.
Article - 15 min
2. Three Types of Forest Carbon Projects and Why They Matter
Pachama
Pachama is an organization that uses remote sensing and machine learning technologies to measure and monitor the amount of carbon stored in forests. This article breaks down the differences between the three types of forest carbon projects that they work with: reforestation, improved forest management, and avoided deforestation.
Article - 10 min
Climate Student
3. Forest Carbon Explainer Videos
Elias Ayrey
Elias Ayrey has a PhD in forest remote sensing and knows a lot about how the forest carbon ecosystem works, having been the Head Scientist at Pachama until recently. These four videos are a great introduction to the different types of forest projects, how forest credits are created, and how carbon in a forest is measured.
Video - 60 min
4. California is banking on forests to reduce emissions. What happens when they go up in smoke?
Carbon Plan
One critical concept for understanding forest carbon markets is the buffer pool, an insurance mechanism to help counteract the lack of permanence of carbon stored in forests, especially given climate-driven effects like wildfires. This article describes some problems with buffer pools as currently designed in the context of a major 2020 wildfire event in an Oregon forest.
Article - 15 min
Carbon Plan
NCX, forest carbon projects, and other short-duration carbon removal credit schemes often try to make use of a scheme called ton-year accounting, that's worth reading up on, both to understand its potential uses and shortcomings.
Article - 45 min
6. The Climate Solution Actually Adding Millions of Tons of CO2 Into the Atmosphere
ProPublica (Lisa Song and James Temple)
This article is really important - it points out some of the many ways that the rules of some forest offset programs can be gamed to claim more carbon credits (and justify emissions) than actually performed.
Article - 50 min
7. Photosynthesis Enhanced Trees Grow Faster and Capture More Carbon
Living Carbon
Turning towards some more experimental, leading-edge work on forest carbon, the company Living Carbon is attempting to use biotech to create trees that can both perform photosynthesis more efficiently and decay less quickly. Check out their recent research!
Article - 15 min
Climate Master
8. Terraformation x USFS: Seed Supply Webinar
Terraformation
Terraformation is another reforestation focused startup, and this video featuring them focuses on a key bottleneck to scaling reforestaion, that being the supply and preservation of seeds.
Video - 35 min
9. Future climate risks from stress, insects and fire across US forests
Anderegg et al
One issue with relying on afforestation as a large-scale enhanced carbon sink is that they are susceptible to all sorts of stresses that become worse as a result of climate change. This recent paper models potential future scenarios for each of these stresses.
Report - 45 min
10. Evergrow: Permanent Capital for Reforestation
Directionally Correct
This collection of many linked blogposts is very worth reading through if you want to think about how a reforestation business might be operated practically. James brainstorms 30 questions related to his reforestation business idea and answers them all over the long post series - would recommend them all!
Blogpost - 60 min
Reforestation Hub
A map and several articles and datasets about where the 133 million acres in the United States are that are ripe for reforestation.
Website - 45 min