How hurricanes threaten forests and the carbon markets that depend on them

A single hurricane hitting New England’s forests can wipe out decades of carbon storage, a new study finds.

As climate change heats the oceans and boosts hurricane formation, worsening storms with faster winds are destroying the region’s forested areas, according to a study published Wednesday in the journal Global Change Biology. It is said to reach even deeper. Currently, a single major storm can knock down as much as 10% of trees in this heavily forested area.

Researchers found that when wind speed increases slightly, damage increases exponentially. With an increase of 8%, the number of areas with high destruction increased more than 10 times. That’s an increase of 16%, or more than 25 times.

The findings pose a problem for forest carbon markets, which aim to sell “credits” generated by storing carbon from the atmosphere in growing trees.

With so many companies turning to carbon credits as a way to “offset” their greenhouse gas emissions, the carbon credit market, of which forestry is a major part, will grow to $100 billion by the end of 2010, and a quarter of According to Morgan Stanley, it is expected to grow to $1 trillion by mid-century.

As U.S. forests grow, they currently reduce the equivalent of about 15 percent of the nation’s fossil fuel emissions, according to the Department of Agriculture. Government agencies and state partners have sought to encourage markets where landowners can sell the carbon stored in their growing forests on local and international markets.

There is much debate about whether carbon offsets really reduce emissions. But all versions of carbon offset plans are based on the idea that carbon is permanently removed from the atmosphere, and that requires trees to remain standing.

“If we are going to rely on forest carbon as the primary tool to mitigate climate change (which seems to be the main direction policy and voluntary/mandatory carbon markets are moving in), then we must We need to properly consider this risk to forest carbon,” said co-author Shersin Joseph Tambor Davila of Dartmouth College and Harvard Forest.

Tumber Dávila’s research shows that forest carbon storage companies are facing bankruptcy. Rather, it is similar to a bank that does not have sufficient capital reserves to cover a sudden depletion of deposits.

“Current carbon market policies are incredibly inadequate to buffer against these risks, with a single hurricane capable of emitting the equivalent of 10 tonnes of carbon.[-plus] “Carbon has been sequestered from New England forests for years,” he said.

To put these numbers into perspective, in California’s regulated carbon market, the largest in the United States, “less than 3% of carbon credits are set aside to reduce catastrophic risk,” he said. It pointed out.

If a tree falls due to a storm or fire, the carbon offset disappears. This poses a serious problem for West Coast companies like Green Diamond. Green Diamond received millions of dollars from tech companies seeking to offset fossil fuel use with forest protection, but in the end, devastating wildfires caused by climate change burned through the forests, Oregon says.・Public newspaper reports. broadcast.

The project “depended on living trees,” the station reported. Each year, they acted like worker bees, collecting carbon dioxide and using photosynthesis with the help of sunlight and water to store more carbon dioxide in wood. ”

But a fire caused the company to lose 3.3 million tons of live trees that were holding back carbon dioxide. This is equivalent to the annual emissions from the exhaust pipes of his 700,000 cars.

Global change biology research extends this investigation beyond wildfires to storm damage.

However, unlike fire damage, this damage is not instantaneous. It takes up to 20 years for fallen trees to become a net source of emissions, offset by the carbon stored by surrounding regrowing forests, and up to a century for them to fully decompose. .

Nevertheless, the authors expressed caution about the future of New England’s forests on a warming planet, not to mention their usefulness as financial instruments for companies that cannot reduce emissions.

A single storm “is likely to deplete the risk reserves over a 100-year period,” Tumber Dávila said.