Thursday, March 18, 2010

California Air Resources Board Withdraws Controversial Clearcutting Protocol

The California Air Resources Board (ARB), which administers California’s climate change efforts under the state’s Global Warming Solutions Act, recently decided to withdraw a controversial “forest project protocol” that would have allowed landowners, including timber companies, to earn carbon credits under California’s cap-and-trade regime for clear-cutting and other potentially harmful forestry practices. California’s statewide program is among the first in the nation, and it serves as a model for other states, regions, and the federal government as they consider similar climate change efforts and legislation. Importantly, California is expected to become part of the Western Climate Initiative, a regional cap-and-trade effort by several Western states and Canadian provinces. Thus, this change to the California model program that restricts the issuance of carbon credits could lead to environmental benefits in the West and across the nation as other similar programs come online.

The withdrawal of the controversial policy came in response to a formal letter sent by the Center for Biological Diversity (“the Center”) in November that accused the ARB’s carbon-crediting policy of violating the California Environmental Quality Act due to the ARB’s failure to consider the foreseeable environmental consequences of adopting the clear-cutting forestry crediting policy, as the law requires. In this case, according to the Center, the foreseeable environmental consequences were to incentivize clear-cutting and other environmentally destructive logging practices that do nothing to address climate change but do hurt the forest’s ability to continue to absorb carbon dioxide (CO2) from the atmosphere.

Environmentally, clear-cutting has several negative impacts, both on forests and on the broader surrounding ecology. Clear-cutting can lead to soil run-off, diminishing water quality. The practice also causes a greater disturbance to the local ecosystem than more sustainable forestry practices by destroying essential habitat, fragmenting the habitat that remains, and ultimately culminating in a loss local of biodiversity. Additionally, replanting to restore the forest and to recapture the carbon lost in the process of cutting will take years and even decades to accomplish—time that we may not have left to address climate change before atmospheric CO2 concentrations reach critical and even catastrophic levels.

By rescinding the policy, the ARB will effectively change the incentive structures around the state’s climate change cap-and-trade program. Since clear-cutting forestry programs will no longer be able to receive credits under the law, the effect is to incentivize better forestry practices overall, which in turn leads to healthier forests and greater CO2 sequestration—and, consequently, greater climate change mitigation—by those forests over time. While this one change alone, even if followed by every other cap-and-trade program, will not in itself halt climate change, it does increase the integrity of the program and the covered forests’ effectiveness at CO2 mitigation over time. So, while this policy change is not a silver bullet, it is a positive step in the right direction.

By Jeremey Dobbins, Legal Intern

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