Climate Change is Real & Forests Are Part of the Solution
Oregon has 30 million acres of forests. Those forests capture more than half of Oregon’s human-caused emissions and provide unrivaled climate benefits through active forest management, production of carbon-friendly wood products and avoided use of fossil fuel-intensive alternatives like concrete and steel.
What is climate smart forestry?
Managing forests to increase their ability to adapt to climate change and enhance their ability to capture carbon from the atmosphere and store it in wood fiber, including in products like lumber.
Carbon Policies We Support
- Are flexible and incentive-based
- Incentivize both carbon capture in forests and carbon storage in wood products
- Reduce fuel for wildfire on public lands
- Bring back or create new forests
- Invest in technologies to make energy from materials not suited for lumber (like tree limbs and tops)
- Enable the use of mass timber in commercial construction
- Encourage the use of sustainably sourced wood products
- Fund and promote research to increase the lifecycle of wood products
- Recognize emissions from biomass and the disposal of wood products are carbon neutral
- Account for emissions associated with the manufacturing, transportation, installation, maintenance, and disposal of building materials (embodied carbon)
- Give credit for carbon stored in wood products relative to alternative building products
- Are in non-regulatory carbon markets
- Are in regulatory carbon markets that do not reduce annual harvested wood fiber
- Are real, measurable, additional and avoid or at least recognize the climate impact of offshoring domestic wood demand
- Include credits for using wood in place of a carbon-intensive alternatives in state-based carbon markets
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