HomeMy WebLinkAbout10-18-19 Public Comment - N. Bishop - Vision and Goals Community ForumFrom:Terry Cunningham
To:Agenda
Subject:FW: vision and Goals Forum comments
Date:Friday, October 18, 2019 7:07:44 AM
This was not sent to all commissioners, so I'm forwarding to Agenda.
Terry Cunningham - City Commissioner
City of Bozeman | 121 North Rouse Avenue | P.O. Box 1230 | Bozeman, MT 59771
P: 406.595-3295 | E: Tcunningham@bozeman.net | W: www.bozeman.net
From: Norman Bishop [nabishop@q.com]Sent: Thursday, October 17, 2019 7:53 PMTo: Terry Cunningham; I-Ho Pomeroy; Jeff KraussSubject: vision and Goals Forum comments
Commissioners:
Looking toward the Vision and Goals Community Forum next week, I would like to
share a few comments with you.
I applaud the Bozeman Urban Forestry Management Plan, and its authors. As a
former graduate student in Forestry, and a career national park ranger, I have a
long-term appreciation for trees, and for their value to all of us. I’ve planted 150
trees on my own yard north of town. We would all be better off if we followed
Rene’ Dubos’s call to action: “Think globally, act locally.” Please permit me to
share a few global thoughts re: trees.
My recent reading of numerous books, articles, and reports on climate change tell
me that the scale of tree restoration globally required to substantially reduce climate
change is immense, but is an effective [long-term] strategy for climate change
mitigation. European scientists Bastin et al. write that ecosystems could support 0.9
billion more hectares of forest; more than a 25% increase in forested area, with 500
billion trees that would hold 200 gigatonnes of carbon at maturity (1 gigatonne or
metric gigaton is equal to 1 billion metric tons. A metric ton is 1000 kilograms).
That would cut the atmospheric carbon pool by 25%.
Bastin, Jean-Francois, Yelena Finegold, Claude Garcia, Danilo Mollicone, Marcelo
Rezende, Devin Routh, Constantin M. Zohner, Thomas W. Crowther.
The global tree restoration potential. Science 05 Jul 2019: Vol. 365, Issue 6448, pp.
76-79.
DOI: 10.1126/science.aax0848
Swiss ecologist Thomas Crowther and his colleagues found that there is enough
room in the world’s parks, forests, and abandoned land to plant 1.2 trillion trees,
that could cancel out a decade of carbon dioxide emissions. He said that, “Trees are
our most powerful weapon against climate change.” The scientists combined forest
inventory data from 1.2 million locations and satellite images, and estimate there
are 3 trillion trees on Earth. Crowther said, “There’s 400 gigatons [of CO2 stored]
now in the 3 trillion trees.”
The United Nations’ Trillion Tree Campaign has planted nearly 1.5 billion trees
across the globe in recent years, and Australia plans to plant a billion by 2050 to
meet its Paris Agreement goals. Is even this too little, too late?
https://aaas.confex.com/aaas/2019/meetingapp.cgi/Paper/23744
https://www.ethz.ch/content/dam/ethz/main/eth-
zurich/global/events/2019/AAAS%202019/Understanding%20Carbon%20Cycle%20Feedbacks%20to%20Predict%
20Climate%20Change_Thomas%20Crowther_ETH%20Zurich_%20AAAS%202019_US%20Letter%20size.pdf
The 2018 IPCC 1.5 Degree Warming Report highlighted reforestation (replanting
an area with trees) and afforestation (establishing a forest on land not previously
forested) to lower emissions, but neither strategy can remove sufficient carbon by
growing young trees in the critical next decade. In contrast, proforestation
(growing existing forests to their ecological potential) is a more effective,
immediate, and low-cost approach that could be mobilized across suitable forests of
all types.
www.ipcc.ch
Tufts professor emeritus William R. Moomaw and others write that proforestation
- growing existing forests to their ecological potential - mitigates climate change
and serves the greatest good. They point out that intact and older forests annually
sequester large quantities of CO2, above and below ground, for long periods of
time. They are the most carbon-dense and biodiverse terrestrial ecosystems, with
other benefits to society and the economy. U.S. temperate and boreal forests
remove enough CO2 to reduce national net emissions by 11%.
Moomaw, William R., Susan A. Masino, and Edward K. Faison. Intact Forests in
the United States: Proforestation Mitigates Climate Change and Serves the Greatest
Good. Frontiers for Global Change, 11 June 2019
https://doi.org/10.3389/ffgc.2019.00027.
In a 2018 article, “Public Forests Should be Carbon Reserves,” George Wuerthner
notes that, “Increasingly it is clear that the greatest value of our public forests might
be to end all thinning/logging and protect them as carbon reserves.” Surprisingly,
“…more forest cutting and removal results from deforestation of both private and
public lands in the United States than any other country in the world!” He cites a
2018 AAAS study that logging and thinning projects contributed more CO2
emissions in Oregon than those from all the cars, airplanes, and industrial sources in
the state. “He concludes, “Setting aside all public forests as carbon reserves is
easily the highest and best use of these public lands.”
http://www.thewildlifenews.com/2018/06/12/public-forests-should-be-carbon-reserves/
From Global warming of 1.5C IPCC Special Report Summary for Policymakers, P.
18: “All pathways that limit global warming to 1.5C with limited or no overshoot
project the use of carbon dioxide removal (CDR) on the order of 100–1000 GtCO2
over the 21st century. CDR would be used to compensate for residual emissions
and, in most cases, achieve net negative emissions to return global warming to 1.5C
following a peak.”
And, “Existing and potential CDR measures include afforestation and
reforestation, land restoration and soil carbon sequestration (BECCS), direct air
carbon capture and storage (DACCS), and enhanced weathering and ocean
alkalinization. These differ widely in terms of maturity, potentials, costs, risks, co-
benefits and trade-offs. To date, only a few published pathways include CO2
removal measures other than afforestation and BECCS.”
www.ipcc.ch
Norman A. Bishop
4898 Itana Circle
Bozeman, MT 59715
(406) 582-0597