I have the easiest job on this panel.
I get to talk about an amazing technology. A technology for large-scale carbon capture and storage. It’s a real solution that already delivers ambitious mitigation.
This technology is able to capture and store billions of tons of carbon without adverse environmental effect.
The technology is proven and simple. It involves ultraviolet, visible radiation and molecular reaction.
Chemists know it as:
6 CO2 + 6 H2O + energy
The rest of us know it as:
Photosynthesis
For the forest products industry, photosynthesis is the core of everything we do. Photosynthesis is the ultimate green power. Through photosynthesis, and the use of trees, society can create a response to climate change that is achievable and sustainable.
The numbers tell the story.
For each ton of wood produced by a tree, 1.5 tons of carbon dioxide is removed from the atmosphere.
But that’s just the beginning. When you make something from a tree, the carbon that is sequestered in forests and the forest products themselves largely offsets the carbon produced by the manufacturing process.
Each year, over 100 billion tons of atmospheric carbon dioxide are stored in long-lived wood products. Whether it’s basic building lumber or an engineered decorative panel, products from sustainably managed forests hold the answer.
Listen to the IPCC writing about managed forests:
"In the long term, a sustainable forest management strategy aimed at maintaining or increasing forest carbon stocks, while producing an annual sustained yield of timber, fiber or energy from the forest, will generate the largest sustained mitigation benefit."
We are asked on this panel to advocate practical and useful policy options that will help scale up our solution. Here are my recommendations for ensuring that managed forests are part of the global solution.
1. Protect the economic value of the tree. If there is value in the tree, new forests will be planted. Wood is good. Environmentally, it is better than most product substitutes. Promote and use forest products.
2. Create strong incentives for third-party certification to sustainable forestry standards. Third-party certification systems are available to assure sustainable management. Only sustainable harvesting and replanting earn our industry a place in the 21st century. Ninety percent of the world’s forests are not now protected by a certification system. Conservation set-asides protect some. The rest are vulnerable.
3. Demand mutual recognition among different certification systems. Through certification, forest health is protected and forest biodiversity is maintained. The world does not need a single certification system — it does need world-wide verification of good management.
4. Reduce financial risk. A managed forest is a high-tech forest. Every aspect from selective breeding to the conventionally cloned seed, to fertilization to modern harvesting technology is based on decades of scientific research and development. Market deployment of forest technology takes time. Policy frameworks must support financial rewards for investments in managed forests.
5. Give credit where credit is due. The carbon credit should recognize investment in the timberland and be transferable along the value chain. In this way, landowners will be encouraged to adopt practices that ensure long-term maintenance of forests. Credit for carbon stored in products can be derived from the underlying carbon credit in the tree.
6. Let the marketplace work. We know how to trade value internationally. Business as usual in a free market is characterized by adaptation, opportunism and innovation. Put global coordination of the carbon market into assuring a fluid and transparent trading mechanism but let the buyers and sellers work out the rest.
Our panel addresses mitigation in a carbon constrained world. The earth offers her own solution with photosynthesis. It is not patented or trademarked. It is elemental, clean and sustainable. Technology transfer mechanisms are not needed for the core process.
Photosynthesis is available without significant capital investment to partner in our capital intensive solution.
Let’s be sure public policy does not diminish the opportunity.
Thank you.
Related information:
www.weyerhaeuser.com/environment/reducingpollution/globalclimatechange.asp
