Papers

Forests across the Western U.S. face unprecedented risk due to historic fire exclusion, environmental degradation, and climate change. Forest management activities like ecological thinning, prescribed burning, and meadow restoration can improve landscape resilience. Resilient forests are at a lower risk of high-intensity wildfires, drought, insects, and other disturbances and provide a wide range of benefits to ecosystems and communities. However, insufficient funding limits implementation of critically needed management. To address this challenge, we propose a multi-benefit framework that leverages the diverse benefits of forest management to engage a suite of stakeholders in sharing project costs. We take a three-pronged approach to develop our conceptual model: examining existing frameworks for environmental project implementation, conducting a literature review of forest management benefits, and evaluating case studies. Through our framework, we describe the steps to engage partners, starting by identifying benefits that could accrue to potential public and private beneficiaries, and moving through an iterative and collaborative process of valuing benefits, which can accrue over different spatial and temporal scales, in close consultation with potential beneficiaries themselves. The aim of this approach is to stack funding streams associated with each valued benefit to fully fund a given forest management project. The multi-benefit framework has the potential to unlock new sources of funding to meet the exceptional challenges of climate and wildfire disturbances. We apply the framework to dry forests of the Western U.S., but opportunities exist for expanding and modifying this approach to any geography or ecosystem where management provides multiple benefits.

Recent drought, wildfires and rising temperatures in the western US highlight the urgency of increasing resiliency in overstocked forests. However, limited valuation information hinders the broader participation of beneficiaries in forest management. We assessed how historical disturbances in California’s Central Sierra Nevada affected live biomass, forest water use and carbon uptake and estimated marginal values of these changes. On average, low-severity wildfire caused greater declines in forest evapotranspiration (ET), gross primary productivity (GPP) and live biomass than did commercial thinning. Low-severity wildfires represent proxies for prescribed burns and both function as biomass removal to alleviate overstocked conditions. Increases in potential runoff over 15 years post-disturbance were valued at $108,000/km2 for commercial thinning versus $234,000/km2 for low-severity wildfire, based on historical water prices. Respective declines in GPP were valued at −$305,000 and −$1,317,000/km2, based on an average social cost of carbon. Considering biomass levels created by commercial thinning and low-severity fire as more-sustainable management baselines for overstocked forests, carbon uptake over 15 years post-disturbance can be viewed as a benefit rather than loss. Realizing this benefit upon management re-entry may require sequestering thinned material. High-severity wildfire and clearcutting resulted in greater declines in ET and thus greater potential water benefits but also substantial declines in GPP and live carbon. These lessons from historical disturbances indicate what benefit ranges from fuels treatments can be expected from more-sustainable management of mixed-conifer forests and the importance of setting an appropriate baseline.