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**Testimony of**

**Scott Simon, Arkansas State Director**

**The Nature Conservancy**

**Before the**

**Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources**

**on S.2593,**

**The Forest Landscape Restoration Act of 2008**

**April 1, 2008**

The Nature Conservancy is an international, nonprofit organization
dedicated to the conservation of biological diversity. Our mission is to
preserve the plants, animals and natural communities that represent the
diversity of life on Earth by protecting the lands and waters they need
to survive. Our on-the-ground conservation work is carried out in all 50
states and in more than 30 foreign countries and is supported by
approximately one million individual members. The Nature Conservancy has
protected more than 117 million acres of land and 5,000 miles of river
around the world. Our work also includes more than 100 marine
conservation projects in 21 countries and 22 U.S. states.

**[Need for the Forest Landscape Restoration Act]{.underline}**

Millions of acres of publicly-owned forests are in poor health, putting
people and nature at risk. These forests protect our drinking water,
help regulate our climate and shelter wildlife. But across the country,
many of our national forests and other public lands are overgrown and
choked with vegetation as a result of past land management practices and
fire exclusion. Unnaturally dense forests are more vulnerable to severe
wildfire and destructive pests such as bark beetles which threaten
forests in many places throughout the nation. Climate change is an
additional stress to unhealthy forests, with longer wildfire seasons and
winters that are warm enough for pests such as bark beetles to keep
reproducing.

Many forests in the South and Western states depend on a certain amount
of fire to maintain their health. However, fire exclusion and other
factors have altered this natural balance and caused a build-up of trees
and other vegetation that today are fueling unnaturally severe fires.
The scale of this problem is illustrated by a recent study that showed
that fire and ecological conditions across 80% of the continental U.S.
have been moderately or highly altered.[^1] Seven of the worst ten fire
seasons since the 1950's have occurred in just the last 11 years.[^2]

Unnaturally severe fires put communities and livelihoods at risk and
devastate forests.

In 2002 the Rodeo-Chediski burned nearly half a million acres in Arizona
and caused 30,000 people to be evacuated. Also that year, the Biscuit
fire burned 499,570 acres in Oregon and the Hayman fire in Colorado
burned 137,760 acres and 600 structures were lost. In 2007, the Georgia
Bay complex burned 441,705 acres and 9 homes.

Fire suppression costs are sky-rocketing. The USDA Forest Service spent
\$1.5 billion on fire suppression in 2006. In fiscal year 2008 the
Forest Service is spending 46% of its budget on wildfire suppression and
other fire-related activities,[^3] compared to 13% in 1991. These trends
threatened to transform the U.S. Forest Service into the U.S Fire
Service. Expensive fires means agencies cannot fund their other
programs.

Forest treatments provide the opportunity to reduce severe fire risk,
restore forest health and stimulate local economic activities. For
forests that are unnaturally dense, removing the build up of small
trees, based on ecological principles, helps reduce the excess
vegetation that fuels unnaturally severe fire and creates the spaces
that certain tree species need to grow and thrive. The woody biomass
removed by thinning can be used by small wood processing industries to
develop a wide range of products from solid wood items like flooring and
furniture to products from waste material like electricity and wood
stove pellets. Developing new markets for the by-products of thinning
provides an economic boost to communities in rural areas that have
suffered in recent years due to the decline of wood-processing
industries.

Current treatments to thin trees and reduce fuels in publicly owned
forests are not happening at a scale which will restore forest
health**.** Over the past four years, federal land management agencies
have treated on average three million acres annually, an amount that
represents only two percent of the total lands that need to be treated
to restore forest health. Most treatments have not been at a scale that
will restore health to our public forestlands. Stewardship contracting
is tool that was developed to advance forest restoration, yet after four
years, the average area of land treated is only 750 acres for a 10-year
stewardship contract. These small contracts are not sufficient to
sustain the industries that process woody biomass. Only three
restoration projects over 10,000 acres have been carried out using
stewardship contracts. Under the current approach, few, if any, projects
receive sufficient funding to stimulate economic development and create
stable markets for the products of thinning treatments.

**[Strengths of the Forest Landscape Restoration Act]{.underline}**

The legislation will establish a Forest Landscape Restoration Fund of up
to \$40 million annually, available on a competitive basis, for up to 10
years of landscape-scale fuels treatments on National Forest and DOI
agency lands. We believe that making funding available via a competitive
process, to those projects that meet a set of national eligibility
criteria, coupled with approval by the Secretaries of Agriculture and
the Interior and advice from Science and Technical Advisory Groups, is
an appropriate process and one that builds upon some of the most
successful elements of the Collaborative Forest Restoration Program in
New Mexico. We think it is especially important that eligible landscapes
demonstrate a high level of match between the federal investment in
fuels treatment and private investment in infrastructure and capacity
building.

The Nature Conservancy uses the phrase "enabling conditions" to describe
how we choose among the many places we could invest. Our organization
achieves success by working in places where biodiversity conservation
matters, but we are also careful to pick places where all indications
are that success can be achieved. We believe that the eligibility
criteria in the Forest Landscape Restoration Act will serve as an
effective screen for enabling conditions.

In particular, we support the criteria in the legislation requiring that
eligible landscapes must have:

1.  Science-based determination of forest health need

2.  A collaborative process in place and the scale of landscape to be
    restored is 50,000 acres or more

3.  Wood-processing and restoration infrastructure is in place or
    planned

4.  Collaboratively developed ecological restoration plan is
    substantially completed

5.  Capacity to complete NEPA analysis is demonstrated for some portions
    of the landscape

6.  Potential for cost savings in treatments and fire suppression.

7.  Evidence of significant non-federal investment in capacity building,
    infrastructure or treatments.

Some have asked where the funding for the Forest Landscape Restoration
Fund will come from. The legislation appropriately targets \$40 million
of the Hazardous Fuel Reduction line item to these high priority
landscapes. We believe this is a good investment. Furthermore, the
amount of increases in the Senate Interior Appropriation bills for this
line item over the past few years is roughly equal to the amount
authorized for the Fund.

We also believe that the Fund creates an incentive for land managers to
develop strong projects that meet the eligibility criteria, even if only
a few receive funding. This effect has been demonstrated in New Mexico,
where after seven years the Collaborative Forest Restoration Program has
stimulated many projects that meet the criteria even though only small
number are funded each year.

**[Restoration Experience in Arkansas Shows Why FLRA Is
Needed]{.underline}**

The experience in Arkansas with declining forest health is similar to
other states. The story is familiar: seventy years of fire suppression
resulted in a denser forest. In the Ozarks, the increase was from an
average of 52 trees per acre to 148 trees per acre, with many areas
having 300-1,000 stems per acre. These forests became increasingly
unhealthy as trees compete for nutrients and water. The effect was
uncharacteristic wildfire and outbreaks of native insects and diseases
that resulted in 300,000 acres of dead oak trees.

Responding to these indicators of unhealthy forests, The Nature
Conservancy and a variety of agency partners and other stakeholders
formed a team (the oak ecosystem restoration team) more than a decade
ago to collaborate on a restoration project. The team agreed on the
desired ecological condition they wanted to achieve and used that as a
foundation for their work together. The team came up with a simple but
elegant implementation plan that included monitoring. Resources were
purposefully concentrated on a large 60,000 acre demonstration area in
the Ouachita National Forest, rather than spread across the Bayou Ranger
District's 280,000 acres.

The team implemented the restoration plan and achieved the desired
ecological condition on much of the landscape. Since 2001, ninety
percent of the demonstration area has had a mechanical or prescribed
burn treatment. More than a third of the acres have received multiple
treatments, such as more than one burn or a combination of mechanical
thinning and burning.

The monitoring plan has been implemented, providing the team with data
to show that the restoration treatments had the expected effects:
increased plant diversity and forage production, lower intensity fires,
fewer trees per acre, and a healthier forest. The monitoring program was
seven percent of the total cost and worth the expense. The data, in
combination with public outreach through pamphlets, presentations, field
tours for policy makers and others, and information panels at
demonstration sites, has helped convince the skeptics and build support
for this large scale of restoration.

Since the early success of the original restoration, the project has
grown to over 110,000 acres and now includes National Park, State
Wildlife, and private lands. The restoration treatments are implemented
jointly. The demonstration landscape was used as an example for six
additional restoration projects. A total of 600,000 acres of treatment
are in progress and showing similar results.

The team in Arkansas did face three major challenges in accomplishing
this work. First, the agencies have a great deal of difficulty
prioritizing projects and concentrating resources. Even though this
landscape project was identified as a priority, the team struggled every
year to keep the resources concentrated on the demonstration project.
Second, the project was set back every year by "fire borrowing," when
the Forest Service had to divert its project funding to cover the fire
suppression costs. Each time these allocated funds are diverted, the
work comes to a halt. The Nature Conservancy's crews try hard to keep
the projects going anyway, adding resources and personnel to make sure
the treatments continued. Finally, the cost of mechanical treatments is
high, and there is no current or historical market in the Ozarks for
small-diameter hardwood stems.

The experience in Arkansas reflects the fact that unhealthy forests and
altered fire regimes are not just a western problem. The solutions found
in Arkansas are widely applicable to fire-dependent ecosystems across
the nation. The three challenges in Arkansas are also broadly reflective
of barriers faced everywhere that landscape-scale ecological restoration
is attempted. The Forest Landscape Restoration Act will address the key
needs of such projects.

**[Summary]{.underline}**

The Nature Conservancy is strongly supportive of the four anticipated
outcomes of this legislation:

1)  Create approximately 10 large-scale examples where targeted
    investments in ecological restoration and prioritized use of the
    Hazardous Fuel Reduction line item will help get ahead of the
    problem of escalating fire suppression costs on overgrown federal
    lands.

2)  Stimulate markets for small diameter wood and biomass by creating
    conditions, in the selected landscapes, for stable levels of
    restoration. Once these markets are established, the anticipated
    outcome is reductions in the per-acre treatment costs.

3)  Establish a positive incentive for federal land managers to develop
    and implement collaborative, large-scale restoration projects that
    are based on agreed-upon science, and provide woody by-products to
    forest industries. That positive incentive is access to consistent
    funding.

4)  Finally, the legislation will create a direct linkage between
    federal investment in hazardous fuels reduction, private investment
    in wood processing infrastructure, and philanthropic investment in
    capacity building. This would leverage all three sources of funding
    to address the need of improving forest health.

Thank you for the opportunity to present this testimony. I would be
pleased to answer any questions you may have.

CITATIONS

[^1]: Blankenship, K., A. Shlisky, W. Fulks, E. Contreras, D. Johnson,
    J. Patton, J.Smith and R. Swaty. 2007. An Ecological Assessment of
    Fire and Biodiversity Conservation Across the Lower 48 States of the
    U.S. Global Fire Initiative Technical Report 2007-1. The Nature
    Conservancy, Arlington, VA.

[^2]: [www.nifc.gov](http://www.nifc.gov/)

[^3]: USDA Forest Service, Overview of FY 2008 President's Budget,
    Forest Service Budget Justification.