A hill with an ice core, known as a pingo, in the Mackenzie River Delta, Northwest Territories. Credit...Renaud Philippe for The New York Times
Wildfires and thawing permafrost are causing the region to release more
carbon dioxide than its plants remove, probably for the first time in
thousands of years.
For thousands of
years, the shrubs, sedges, mosses and lichens of the Arctic have
performed a vital task for the planet: gulping down carbon dioxide from
the air and storing the carbon in their tissues. When the plants die,
this carbon is entombed in the frigid soil, where it no longer helps
warm Earth’s surface.
But as fossil
fuel emissions heat the planet, balmier air temperatures are thawing
Arctic tundra, activating carbon-hungry microbes, and more vegetation is
being burned up by wildfires.
The
result, for the past two decades or so, is that the tundra has been
adding more carbon dioxide to the atmosphere than it has removed, a
reversal from the usual state of affairs since the peak of the last ice
age.
It’s one of many signs of rapid change in the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Arctic Report Card,
the agency’s yearly checkup on the polar region. The 2024 report card
was issued on Tuesday in Washington at the annual meeting of the
American Geophysical Union, an association of earth and space
scientists.
Arctic Methane Release
For the 11th year
in a row, the Arctic this year was more abnormally warm than the world
as a whole, the report card said. The period from October 2023 to
September was the second-warmest for the region since 1900. In the
Northwest Passage, the sea route that links the Atlantic and the Pacific
through the islands of northern Canada, the area covered by sea ice
this summer was the lowest since records began. Parts of Arctic Canada
had their shortest snow season on record.
“The
Arctic today, year after year, looks vastly different than the Arctic
did 20 years ago,” said Twila Moon, an editor of the report card and the
deputy lead scientist at the National Snow and Ice Data Center in
Boulder, Colo.
In the Arctic tundra,
there have long been signs of a shift in how much carbon is moving
between the land and the air. But by incorporating more data and better
methods of analysis, scientists can now describe the trend with
confidence: Between 2001 and 2020, wildfires and thawing permafrost
caused the tundra to release more carbon dioxide than its plants removed
from the air, probably for the first time in many millenniums.
How
much this gap widens depends in large part on how much nations rein in
greenhouse warming, said Brendan Rogers, an Arctic scientist at the
Woodwell Climate Research Center in Falmouth, Mass., who contributed to
the report card.
“The more we can do
to lower the overall temperature changes globally, the better we’re
going to be able to deal with permafrost emissions,” Dr. Rogers said.
Gathering data in the vast Arctic environment is always a challenge, but Russia’s war in Ukraine has compounded the difficulties,
including for scientists assessing the carbon cycle. “There are large
parts of Siberia that we just don’t have any data from,” Dr. Rogers
said.
Not all of the news in this year’s report card was bad.
In
the seas around Alaska, ice seal populations challenged by rising
temperatures were deemed healthy. And a cool winter helped Greenland’s
vast ice sheet shed the smallest volume of ice since 2013, around 55
billion tons, though the long-term trend is still that melting ice from
the island is adding enormously to rising sea levels worldwide.
BIRKENFELD, Ore. — Eve Lonnquist’s family has owned a forest in the mountains of northwest Oregon since her grandmother bought the land in 1919. Her 95-year-old father still lives on the 157-acre property. And she and her wife often drive up from their home just outside Portland.
But lately, Ms. Lonnquist, 59 and recently retired, has been thinking about the future of her family’s land. Like many small-forest owners, they draw some income from logging and would like to keep doing so. But they would also like to see the forest, with its stands of Douglas fir, alder and cherry, protected from clear-cutting or being sold off to developers.
“For us, the property is our family’s history,” she said.
More than half of the 751 million acres of forestland in the United States are privately owned, most by people like Ms. Lonnquist, with holdings of 1,000 acres or less. These family forests, environmental groups argue, represent a large, untapped resource for combating the effects of climate change.
Conserving the trees and profiting from them might seem incompatible. But Ms. Lonnquist is hoping to do both by capitalizing on the forest’s ability to clean the air, turning the carbon stored in the forest into credits that can then be sold to polluters who want or need to offset their carbon footprints.
Using a smartphone app by ecoPartners to help inventory Cedar Row Farms, a small family-owned 160-acre forested property. CreditLeah Nash for The New York Times
“Trees are the No. 1 way in which carbon can be removed from the atmosphere and stored in vegetation over the long term,” said Brian Kittler, the western regional office director for the Pinchot Institute for Conservation, which has a program in Oregon to help the owners of family forests develop potentially profitable carbon projects.
Larger forests around the world have already been enlisted as carbon storehouses, through programs like the United Nations initiative for Reducing Emissions From Deforestation and Forest Degradation, or REDD, that encourage forest conservation worldwide in exchange for credits that can be sold on the global carbon markets.
Some large timber companies, including Potlatch, have also entered the markets, reducing their logging to levels below legal limits in order to receive millions of dollars in credits.
Restored Forests Breathe Life Into Efforts Against Climate Change DEC. 23, 2014
But so far, small-forest owners, even conservation-minded ones like Ms. Lonnquist, have not rushed to embrace market-based carbon storage. Many do not even know it exists, and those who do often find the complexities bewildering.
Some owners believe, wrongly, that to enter the carbon markets they must forgo all income from logging. And some, reluctant to forfeit the ability to quickly turn their trees into cash, have balked at signing a contract to keep a forest standing for 15 to 125 years.
Even more daunting, the expense of bringing a forest to the carbon market — a process that involves taking an inventory of the trees, assessing the forest’s carbon content, estimating future growth, and submitting to several levels of auditing — has been so high that it would eliminate any profit for most small landholders.
Environmental organizations like the Pinchot Institute and the Nature Conservancy have for years been searching for a way around these hurdles by educating landowners about the markets’ potential for generating income and finding ways to decrease the costs.
“Traditionally, your only tool to generate revenues has been periodic timber harvest,” said Josh Parrish, director of the Nature Conservancy’s Working Woodlands program, which is working with the owners of private forests in Pennsylvania and Tennessee. “The nice thing about carbon is essentially people are being paid to improve forest management.”
A thinning of fir trees at Cedar Row Farm this summer. Credit Leah Nash for The New York Times
In fact, if small-forest owners can get past the barriers, the carbon markets can be profitable, providing an initial flush of money and then regular yearly payments in much smaller amounts.
The carbon credits from Ms. Lonnquist’s forest could bring an estimated $235,000 over the first six years, and about $6,000 a year after that, said Kyle Holland, the managing director of Ecological Carbon Offset Partners, a California firm that helps small-forest owners enter the carbon markets.
Ms. Lonnquist and her family could still log on a limited basis, as long as they stuck to a plan for managing the forest and maintained a steady level of carbon storage through the forest’s continued growth.
The economic case for private owners entering the carbon markets is likely to get stronger. Forests, especially in areas like the Northwest, where trees grow tall and thick, tend to draw higher prices than many other conservation measures. And with last year’s Paris climate pact, some analysts expect carbon prices, now about $3 to $12 per ton in the United States, to rise.
Mr. Kittler said the conservation institute, which is subsidizing the preparation of Ms. Lonnquist’s forest with the help of a grant from the Department of Agriculture and has partnered with Mr. Holland’s firm for the Oregon project, hoped it would encourage more private owners to enter the markets. Ms. Lonnquist and other owners will be given a choice of selling credits on the global market or on California’s market, created under the state’s 2006 Global Warming Solutions Act.
Recent developments in forestry may help make the prospect more appealing by lowering the initial costs to landholders. Mr. Holland’s company, for example, has developed a digital tool — a smartphone equipped with a laser to measure distance and an inclinometer to measure height — that he believes will greatly reduce the expense of conducting a forest inventory, which typically costs $40,000 to $100,000 or more, depending about the amount of land.
With the specialized smartphone, landholders can take an inventory themselves, photographing and measuring the diameters and heights of their trees. The photos and data are sent to the company’s office in California, where an expert forester goes through the images, identifying the species and checking for damage to the branches or crowns, among other things. Probability models are used to calculate the amount of carbon stored in the forest.
The mathematical proofs developed by the company have been submitted to a scientific journal, Mr. Holland said.
Using traditional methods, a forester conducting an inventory averages three or four forest plots per day and can spend months completing an assessment at a cost of $350 a plot, he said. But Logan Sander, a forester who used the smartphone to inventory Ms. Lonnquist’s forest and recently demonstrated it for two visitors, said he was averaging 30 to 35 plots a day, with the entire job taking only a week to complete.
Individual forest owners who sign up for Mr. Holland’s service pay a $75 application fee and receive the smartphone. If, after conducting an inventory, they choose to move forward with the carbon project, they pay the company $1,350 to complete the process.
Some small properties do not store enough carbon to make even that effort worthwhile. The price of carbon, Mr. Holland said, has to be $10 or more per ton “to make it pencil out” for the owner. And novel methods like Mr. Holland’s still need approval from the companies that verify forest inventories or serve as official market registries.
But Jessica Orrego, the director of forestry for the American Carbon Registry, said such advances might be the key to bringing in small-forest owners.
“We’re fully supportive,” she said. “We’re advocates of innovation. We think it’s extremely important in the carbon market.”
Ms. Lonnquist, who owns the forest here with two brothers and her wife, Lynn Baker, is still considering whether entering the carbon markets would make sense for her family.
The commitment — 125 years if the credits are sold in the California market — gives her some pause, she said.
“That’s well beyond our lifetime, and that’s a commitment that goes with the property,” she said.
She can imagine, though, what she might be doing 20 years from now.
“Maybe I’d just be at home growing carbon,” she said. “And maybe that’s the best thing.”
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