April 5, 2006
At the Institute for Sustainable Forestry's Future Forests working session last fall, a broad cross-section of Humboldt County's forest stakeholders stopped talking about California's regulatory climate long enough to spend a day focused on a shared goal: to maintain a healthy and productive working forest landscape on the North Coast. Presentations at the session identified increasing land values as a serious economic challenge for owners and buyers hoping to manage forestland on a truly sustainable basis. As land values soar it is also more difficult for landowners to justify investments in sustainable forest management based solely on income from harvesting timber.
The California regulatory environment is a clear indication that we, the people of California, value forestland for much more than its ability to produce timber. We also value the services that forests provide: clean water, wildlife habitat, open space, and the feeling of respite we experience when we look out over a well-managed (or wild!) unbroken forested landscape and imagine ... that something is still right with the world. But, how much do we value them? We expect local ranchers pay their taxes, provide local jobs, and to maintain stream conditions that can support healthy salmon populations. Yet we only want to pay them for raising timber and cattle--not for raising salmon ... or murrelets, or owls.
Economists call the services provided by our forests, "ecosystem services." From an economist's perspective the central problem is that there is no existing market for these services. We know it costs money to provide or preserve them, but without markets how do we estimate the value of specific ecosystem services? As the concept of payments for ecosystem services becomes mainstream--with emerging markets for carbon storage leading the way--it becomes increasingly important for forest stakeholders to understand, well, what's at stake.
Payments for ecosystem services such as clean water, habitat, and carbon storage may enable timberland owners to prioritize conservation objectives in their forest management practices and to protect larger forested parcels from subdivision and fragmentation. But if these tools are to serve the North Coast they can't be developed by economists and state policy wonks in a closet. We--the people of the North Coast region --conservationists and landowners, timber workers and environmentalists, ecologists and business owners--need to understand these concepts to protect our forests and our quality of life. We need to help create, shape, and advocate for the policy instruments and mechanisms that will build the markets, and make the payments, for the ecosystem services that we value here in our home watershed.
For more information on the discipline of ecological economics and the emerging potential markets for ecosystem services, please visit ISF's website at http://newforestry.org/ecosystemservices/.
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TOC for Forest & River News, Spring 2006