How do sustainable forest management practices address climate change?

Sustainable forest management (SFM) ensures forests remain forests through continuous cycles of growth, harvest, and regrowth. This is critical to mitigating climate change, as forests absorb, sequester, and store carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Private working forests like those managed by our firm provide nearly 80% of the annual net sequestration and 51% of the carbon stored in all U.S. forests.

In some instances, a forest’s ability to sequester and store carbon is used in carbon-offset programs, typically through afforestation (establishing a forest on land not previously forested) or through improved forest management.

Using wood products in place of more carbon-intensive materials can also improve climate outcomes. Wood is renewable and great at storing carbon, especially if the wood comes from a sustainably managed forest.

If steel and concrete were a country, their combined emissions would be the third largest in the world after the U.S. and China. The more wood we use in place of these and other carbon-intensive materials, the better – as long as we’re maintaining our forests.

Learn more about forests and climate change at www.ForestCarbonDataViz.org.