By Kristin Espeland Gourlay
http://stream.publicbroadcasting.net/production/mp3/wkms/local-wkms-910839.mp3
Ohio River Radio Consortium – What's the value of a forest? It depends on whom you ask. But the nation's Southeastern forests may need some new answers to that question if they're going to survive the growing pace of development.
Southeastern forests make up nearly 30 percent of the nation's forest lands. And they're among the world's most biologically diverse temperate forests home to some 3,000 plant species and nearly 600 bird species. But two recent reports project that these forests are on course for dramatic change within the next 50 years.
One report is from a U.S. Forest Service project focused on providing policymakers, landowners, and scientists the information they need to make decisions about future forest use.
"The work of the Southern Forests Futures Project is focused on trying to simultaneously simulate the development of forest in the south, in response to climate change, changes in population and urbanization, as well as changes in forest management and harvesting," says Wear.
Wear says that, by 2060, nearly 30 million more acres will have been developed in the Southeast.
"That's about a doubling of developed land in the region. That's with about an 80% increase in population here. A majority of that land would come out of forests."
Craig Hanson explains why there's little public outcry: "Continual but dispersed change often goes unnoticed."
Hanson is with the World Resources Institute, whose Southern Forests for the Future project just came out with its own report examining those trends to raise awareness about their implications. He says several factors are driving the kind of incremental change that could amount to lots of lost forest. He says, for example, forest will be lost not only to sprawl but also to converting agricultural land for timber or fuel products, especially as demand grows globally. And Appalachian coal mining will have cleared one and half million acres of forest by the end of this year. But since most Southern forests are privately owned, Hanson says these kinds of changes in land use reflect what owners find the most value in.
"So on average, they're only getting paid for timber, although their forests also provide places for recreation, hunting, carbon sequestration, water purification, you name it, right? Now any business model where you're making five things and you're only getting paid for one of them is not a long-term sustainable business model," Hanson says.
Those kinds of assets are often called ecosystem services. And the healthier and more intact the ecosystem, the better the services it can provide: oxygen to breathe, stable soils that prevent flooding, food, habitat. The challenge, says Jon Erickson, is that those services don't traditionally have any market value. Erickson is an ecological economist with the University of Vermont. He says that's why forest owners don't have much incentive now to keep their forests intact.
"All the incentives in the marketplace are to convert a forest into something else, to convert a forest into board feet and sell it as timber, or to convert the forest land into acres and sell it for development," Erickson says.
And maintaining an intact forest isn't cheap: there are taxes and insurance to be paid, to name a few expenses. But Erickson says an emerging point of view says that keeping ecosystems, including forests, intact might be more valuable - to the owner and to society as a whole. One possibility is to offer tax incentives.
"Giving forest landowners a break on taxes is a tried and true way to give them the incentive to keep forestry either in sustainable forestry or to preserve all those other services that come from forests, and in return, society is essentially compensating the landowner by lowering their tax bill," Erickson says.
The economist says that one way to measure a forest's value is to consider the cost of replacing it. For example, if forest lands act as a city's first line of water filtration from a primary drinking source, what would it cost in terms of man-made infrastructure to replace that filtration system?
So the forces of change shaping Southeastern forests could have major effects on not only our landscape, but our health, and our livelihoods. But some emerging practices - like paying for ecosystem services or putting legal limits on how much land can be developed - may alter some of these trends.