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Health and Safety Benefits of Climate Smart Forestry

Deforestation and forest degradation play a critical role in amplifying these stressors, putting lives at risk. In addition to the massive carbon emissions associated with logging (which accelerates climate change) degraded landscapes of young timber plantations, clearcuts, and logging roads that have replaced real forests are far more susceptible to the effects of climate change. Double jeopardy. Industrial logging practices both accelerate climate change and make it worse for people on the ground. 

These worsening conditions include risks associated with wildfires, heat waves, water shortages, warming waters, landslides, flooding, invasive species, and harmful algae blooms. Many of these effects, like increasing wildfire risk, also put valuable agricultural lands, infrastructure, and residential communities nearby at risk. The LA fires were a classic demonstration of why it’s important to keep conditions that amplify fire risk on the urban perimeter to an absolute minimum. Water shortages caused by too much logging cripples public water suppliers in the dry summer months when the flow of water could be maximized by retaining complex older forests in the uplands.

By themselves, any one of these climate stressors presents a deadly public health hazard worthy of attention by local elected officials, who have been granted primary responsibility for protecting public health and safety by the US Constitution. Take heat stress. Clearcuts eliminate the cooling effect of large, old trees, and as a result, temperatures in open clearcut units can be 40 to 50 degrees hotter than the surrounding forest during summer heat waves.  These are temperatures that can kill, and outdoor forestry workers like those that plant trees in the South, Oregon or California are highly susceptible. Agriculture and forestry workers have by far the highest number of heat related deaths each year – over 35 times that of the next highest category, outdoor construction workers.  It’s not just localized heat effects either. On a broad, regional scale, researchers have found that in temperate regions where at least 15% of forest cover has been removed from pre-industrial times to today, deforestation accounts for one third of the increase in temperature of the average hottest day of the year.

Or take more acute physical hazards. Landslides and deadly floods like those unleashed by Hurricane Helene are made far worse when the land has been stripped of its native forest cover, laced with logging roads, and repeatedly cleared and burned to make way for the next timber crop. Wildfires that burn cooler and more slowly in moist, older, complex stands take off across the land when they hit the hot, dried out tinderboxes of open clearcuts and tiny trees. Hurricane wind damage is more severe in young timber plantations that have replaced big old trees with deep roots in the Southeast making trees falling on people, houses, and powerlines, and roads  more likely. 

Climate smart forest practices have the potential to reverse all of these effects. Proforestation, one practice, means letting trees mature to their maximum ecological potential - which also maximizes their carbon, water storage and cooling effects on local climate. This is an obvious strategy for public lands. National forests, for example, meet only 3% of the nation’s wood products demand but do so at a loss to taxpayers. Phasing out the federal logging program would eliminate wasteful federal spending while reducing climate change risks to people and infrastructure. 

Reclaiming ownership of forestlands from foreign and Wall Street corporations is another climate smart strategy for private lands. The corporate DNA of these entities is antithetical to climate change goals since they are focused on short term profits for investors rather than community stability or implementing the kinds of practices that build up carbon stocks in the long run. These include alternatives to clearcutting and long rotations. By replacing corporate ownership with ownership by families, land trusts, conservation groups, tribes, communities, and public agencies the potential for these practices to become the norm rather than the exception will be greatly enhanced.

Deforestation and forest degradation is a public health and safety crisis that amplifies the effects of climate change. Climate smart practices offer the solution. FCC and its members are dedicated to making the transition happen by working with elected officials to end commercial logging on public lands and to modernize our forest practices and forestland ownership laws to help ensure that fewer and fewer lives will be disrupted by harmful logging practices as the climate crisis continues to unfold.