Category: Science_Land_MN

burning wood was never supposed to be the cornerstone of the European Union’s green energy strategy.
When the bloc began subsidizing wood burning over a decade ago, it was seen as a quick boost for renewable fuel and an incentive to move homes and power plants away from coal and gas. Chips and pellets were marketed as a way to turn sawdust waste into green power.

For millions of years, grazers have roamed nearly every ecosystem on the planet. However, during the late Quarternary period (50,000 to 6,000 years ago), we rapidly lost many of the planet’s largest and most iconic grazing animals, such as the woolly mammoth, giant bison, and ancient horses.

Daniel Valle sped down Highway 317, closing in on the first targets of the day. He was in a hurry. Deforestation alerts had tripled in recent weeks. Police were warning that armed criminal groups had invaded new territory. Another season of destroying the Amazon rainforest was here, and in this corner, the only check on the looming ecological disaster was this: Valle’s small team of inspectors in a dirt-splattered pickup truck.

Last year, legislators in Washington state passed a law to bolster the urban forestry work of the Department of Natural Resources. The agency’s urban and community forestry program, which had just two staffers in 2020, will grow to nine positions once the department finalizes new hires.
Those new staffers, along with a new state-funded grant program, will supercharge the department’s efforts to inventory tree canopy in Washington’s communities, help cities maintain their trees and determine where to plant new ones.

My career as a songwriter began in Manhattan, not far from where I was born. When I moved to Los Angeles in 1968, I became part of the singer-songwriter community that coalesced around Laurel Canyon. I thought California would be wild in the sense of nature. It turned out to be wild in the sense of drugs and parties. I wanted to live close to the kind of wild nature that must exist somewhere on a large scale. Somewhere turned out to be Idaho.

The United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) indicates that we must substantially reduce emissions from burning fossil fuels and simultaneously increase removal of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere by land and ocean reservoirs.

When we think about forests and climate change, our minds often see an image of rainforests burning in the Amazon or tropical jungles being scorched in Indonesia for palm oil.
But new research reveals that climate change has also dramatically affected more temperate, colder forests in North America, potentially accelerating the impacts of global warming even further as these trees store significant amounts of carbon.

Every year, about ten million hectares of land—an area roughly the size of South Korea—are deforested, mainly to clear land for commercial or subsistence agriculture. Forestry and other land use accounts for nearly 14 percent of annual global CO₂ emissions, 5 percent of methane emissions, and 5 percent of nitrous oxide emissions.¹

The global economy won’t reach net-zero carbon emissions without putting an end to deforestation. That’s the conclusion of the United Nations-backed Race to Zero campaign, which pushes companies and investors to reduce emissions. The report, which was published Wednesday in partnership with nonprofit Global Canopy, Science Based Targets initiative and the Accountability Framework Initiative, said companies committing to eliminate emissions by 2050 must act with urgency to stamp out tropical deforestation in their supply chains.

Not far from the town of McKenzie Bridge, Ore., on the western slope of the Cascades, stand towering groves of trees that have survived more than a century of wind, fire, insects and disease. To Jerry Franklin, long-considered one of the foremost authorities on old-growth forests in the Pacific Northwest, this landscape of mature Douglas-fir and western hemlock is thriving and, most significantly, removing evermore carbon from the atmosphere.