As a Remedy to Global Warming, As a Remedy to Global Warming

Xuhui Lee, associate professor of forest meteorology and micrometeorology, at his research site in Norfolk, Conn.© hshapiro8@aol.com“Without understandingepisodicrelease, it’s very hardto get a handle onthe question ofwhether forests canbe used as asequestration tool.”Xuhui LeeThe underlying idea of using trees to offset pollution has also elicited fierce debate, including attimes the odd spectacle of environmentalists angrily protesting reforestation projects andindustrialist tree-huggers ardently advocating them. One critic has accused utilities of selling“a warm, fuzzy feeling” with reforestation projects that are based on faulty carbon accounting.Another has derided such projects as “a morning-after pill for fossil fuel excesses.”The skeptics have at times included countries and companies trying to meet their targets forreducing carbon dioxide emissions under the Kyoto Protocol. The effort to find projects that “lockup” or “sequester” large quantities of carbon, as a way to offset emissions that cannot readily bereduced, has encountered numerous credibility gaps. The Holcim Group, a Swiss cement company,recently pulled out of one non-forest offset scheme, with an executive predicting that looseaccounting standards would produce “other Enrons”among the companies developing such projectsand “other Arthur Andersens” among the auditors. And early this year, a Kyoto certificationcommittee rejected two large-scale reforestation projects in Brazil and Belize. The committee, whichhas yet to accept a single forestry offset, said it could not reliably account for how much carbon theprojects would actually sequester or for how long.What’s going on here? Don’t trees in fact do a lot of our environmental dirty work? Aren’t forestsand forestry projects an indispensable part of the solution to the global-warming crisis? And, if so,can researchers develop a scientific methodology to account for the carbon budgets of differentforest types? That is, can they make the accounting accurate enough that investors and insurancecompanies would be willing to put their money into forest sequestration projects? Or will thebeneficial possibilities of forests get lost even as the painful realities of global warming becomeincreasingly evident?Dean Gus Speth notes that the time for answering such questions is alarmingly brief. He rattles offa list of changes already caused by global warming. Ice sheets and glaciers are melting everywhere.Sea levels have risen 6 inches. Sea temperatures have warmed, fueling more intense hurricanes.A vast area of Siberian permafrost is melting and beginning to release methane, which is 40 times4ENVIRONMENT:YALE The School of Forestry & Environmental Studies