[House Hearing, 116 Congress]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office]
CLIMATE CHANGE AND PUBLIC LANDS: EXAMINING IMPACTS AND CONSIDERING
ADAPTATION OPPORTUNITIES
=======================================================================
OVERSIGHT HEARING
Before the
SUBCOMMITTEE ON NATIONAL PARKS, FORESTS, AND PUBLIC LANDS
OF THE
COMMITTEE ON NATURAL RESOURCES
U.S. HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES
ONE HUNDRED SIXTEENTH CONGRESS
FIRST SESSION
__________
Wednesday, February 13, 2019
__________
Serial No. 116-5
__________
Printed for the use of the Committee on Natural Resources
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COMMITTEE ON NATURAL RESOURCES
RAUL M. GRIJALVA, AZ, Chair
DEBRA A. HAALAND, NM, Vice Chair
GREGORIO KILILI CAMACHO SABLAN, CNMI, Vice Chair, Insular Affairs
ROB BISHOP, UT, Ranking Republican Member
Grace F. Napolitano, CA Don Young, AK
Jim Costa, CA Louie Gohmert, TX
Gregorio Kilili Camacho Sablan, Doug Lamborn, CO
CNMI Robert J. Wittman, VA
Jared Huffman, CA Tom McClintock, CA
Alan S. Lowenthal, CA Paul A. Gosar, AZ
Ruben Gallego, AZ Paul Cook, CA
TJ Cox, CA Bruce Westerman, AR
Joe Neguse, CO Garret Graves, LA
Mike Levin, CA Jody B. Hice, GA
Debra A. Haaland, NM Aumua Amata Coleman Radewagen, AS
Jefferson Van Drew, NJ Daniel Webster, FL
Joe Cunningham, SC Liz Cheney, WY
Nydia M. Velazquez, NY Mike Johnson, LA
Diana DeGette, CO Jenniffer Gonzalez-Colon, PR
Wm. Lacy Clay, MO John R. Curtis, UT
Debbie Dingell, MI Kevin Hern, OK
Anthony G. Brown, MD Russ Fulcher, ID
A. Donald McEachin, VA
Darren Soto, FL
Ed Case, HI
Steven Horsford, NV
Michael F. Q. San Nicolas, GU
Matt Cartwright, PA
Vacancy
Vacancy
David Watkins, Chief of Staff
Sarah Lim, Chief Counsel
Parish Braden, Republican Staff Director
http://naturalresources.house.gov
------
SUBCOMMITTEE ON NATIONAL PARKS, FORESTS, AND PUBLIC LANDS
DEBRA A. HAALAND, NM, Chair
DON YOUNG, AK, Ranking Republican Member
Joe Neguse, CO Louie Gohmert, TX
Diana DeGette, CO Tom McClintock, CA
Debbie Dingell, MI Paul Cook, CA
Steven Horsford, NV Bruce Westerman, AR
Jared Huffman, CA Jody B. Hice, GA
Ruben Gallego, AZ Daniel Webster, FL
Alan S. Lowenthal, CA John R. Curtis, UT
Ed Case, HI Russ Fulcher, ID
Vacancy Rob Bishop, UT, ex officio
Vacancy
Raul M. Grijalva, AZ, ex officio
----------
CONTENTS
----------
Page
Hearing held on Wednesday, February 13, 2019..................... 1
Statement of Members:
Dingell, Hon. Debbie, a Representative in Congress from the
State of Michigan, prepared statement of................... 66
Haaland, Hon. Debra A., a Representative in Congress from the
State of New Mexico........................................ 1
Prepared statement of.................................... 2
Young, Hon. Don, a Representative in Congress from the State
of Alaska.................................................. 3
Prepared statement of.................................... 5
Statement of Witnesses:
Cole, Hans, Director of Environmental Campaigns and Advocacy,
Patagonia, Inc., Ventura, California....................... 31
Prepared statement of.................................... 32
Questions submitted for the record....................... 34
Gonzalez, Patrick, Associate Adjunct Professor, University of
California-Berkeley, Berkeley, California.................. 6
Prepared statement of.................................... 7
Hansen, Lara J., Executive Director and Chief Scientist,
EcoAdapt, Bainbridge Island, Washington.................... 16
Prepared statement of.................................... 18
Questions submitted for the record....................... 26
Oneil, Elaine, Oneil Forest Research and Management, Tenino,
Washington................................................. 36
Prepared statement of.................................... 37
Additional Materials Submitted for the Record:
Harmon, Dr. Mark E., Professor Emeritus, Oregon State
University, statement for the record....................... 67
List of documents submitted for the record retained in the
Committee's official files................................. 73
OVERSIGHT HEARING ON CLIMATE CHANGE AND PUBLIC LANDS: EXAMINING IMPACTS
AND CONSIDERING ADAPTATION OPPORTUNITIES
----------
Wednesday, February 13, 2019
U.S. House of Representatives
Subcommittee on National Parks, Forests, and Public Lands
Committee on Natural Resources
Washington, DC
----------
The Subcommittee met, pursuant to notice, at 10:04 a.m., in
room 1324, Longworth House Office Building, Hon. Deb Haaland
[Chairwoman of the Subcommittee] presiding.
Present: Representatives Haaland, Neguse, DeGette,
Horsford, Huffman, Lowenthal, Case, Grijalva; Young, Westerman,
Hice, Curtis, Fulcher, and Bishop.
Ms. Haaland. The Subcommittee on National Parks, Forests,
and Public Lands will now come to order. The Subcommittee is
meeting today to hear testimony on the impacts of climate
change on public lands, and to consider adaptation
opportunities.
Under Committee Rule 4(f), any oral opening statements at
hearings are limited to the Chairman and Ranking Minority
Member. Therefore, I ask unanimous consent that all other
Members' opening statements be made part of the hearing record,
if they are submitted to the Clerk by 5 p.m. today.
Hearing no objection, so ordered.
STATEMENT OF THE HON. DEBRA A. HAALAND, A REPRESENTATIVE IN
CONGRESS FROM THE STATE OF NEW MEXICO
Ms. Haaland. Today is an exciting day. It will be the first
of a new era for this Committee and for this Congress, an era
of inclusion, where the diverse voices of the American people
are clearly heard in these halls. We will uphold our public
lands as a point of pride that all Americans can share and co-
own. These special places will serve as refuge for our highest
values, and as places of growth toward our Nation's future.
I want to start this hearing, the first of the 116th
Congress for this Subcommittee, by thanking my fellow Members
for joining me in this important work. I am grateful for the
confidence you have expressed in selecting me to chair this
Subcommittee. It is my sincere hope that we will find common
ground on important issues, and I promise you that we will lead
this Congress, the most diverse in history, toward bold policy
solutions that benefit our Federal lands and our communities.
We begin that leadership today as we confront the most
pressing issue facing our Nation, which is climate change. We
will hear testimony from leading scientists about the
disproportionate impact climate change is already having on our
public lands.
Our national parks are warming twice as fast as the rest of
the country. Parks in the Southwest, my home, and the home of
many of my fellow Members here on this dais, are experiencing
unprecedented aridity. That means less water for ecosystems,
which, in turn, means less water for our homes and our farmers,
because we live in a deeply inter-connected world, where
changes to one system impact all others.
We rely on the natural world to provide us with many of the
things we depend on each day, from clean water and clean air to
flood control and coastal protection. At a time when these
natural services are under threat from global climate change,
Americans will require strong leadership to ensure that we are
ready to adapt to these changes and to meet these challenges.
Unfortunately, the Trump administration has failed to
provide this leadership. They see fit to pursue energy
dominance at all costs, to push an extractive and destructive
agenda that has left our public lands responsible for nearly
one-quarter of all CO2 emissions. At the same time,
the Administration has suppressed science and prevented
adaptation. They canceled executive orders outlining adaptation
strategies on public lands, and even pulled back guidance on
climate change and national security. They ignored the science
of climate change, relying on outdated and inadequate mandates,
and put Americans in harm's way.
If this Administration will not take the lead, this
Committee will. Dr. Gonzalez will help us to understand the
threat we face by explaining the impact climate change will
have on our public lands. We will then hear from a top climate
change adaptation scientist, Dr. Lara Hansen, because we can no
longer afford to stand on the sidelines and do nothing.
It is time for America to act on climate change, and our
public lands are one of the best resources for us to do so.
Public lands protect biodiversity and the ecosystems on which
our daily lives depend. They provide space for the natural
world to adapt to the new climate we have created. And they
form the backbone of nearly a $1 trillion outdoor recreation
economy that can help us create good, clean jobs.
Climate change is an unprecedented challenge that will
require big and bold solutions. Today, we take the first step
toward meaningful action by hearing the risks we face, and by
considering how we can prepare our communities, our country,
and our public lands for the challenges climate change
presents.
Thank you all for joining me here today. I look forward to
our leadership on these issues.
Thank you again to the witnesses. I look forward to your
testimony.
[The prepared statement of Ms. Haaland follows:]
Prepared Statement of the Hon. Debra A. Haaland, Chair, Subcommittee on
National Parks, Forests, and Public Lands
Today is an exciting day. It will be the first of a new era for
this Committee and for this Congress. An era of inclusion, where the
diverse voices of the American people are clearly heard in these halls.
We will hold up our public lands as a point of pride that all Americans
share in and co-own. These special places will serve as refuge for our
highest values and as places of growth toward our Nation's future.
I want to start this hearing, the first of the 116th Congress for
the Subcommittee on National Parks, Forests, and Public Lands, by
thanking my fellow Members for joining me in this important work. I am
grateful for the confidence you have expressed in selecting me to chair
this Subcommittee. It is my sincere hope that we will find common
ground on important issues, and I promise you that we will lead this
Congress, the most diverse in history, toward bold policy solutions
that benefit our Federal public lands and our communities.
We begin that leadership today as we confront the most pressing
issue facing our Nation--climate change. We will hear testimony from
leading scientists about the disproportionate impact climate change is
already having on our public lands.
Our national parks are warming twice as fast as the rest of the
country. Parks in the Southwest, my home, and the home of many of my
fellow Members here on the dais, are experiencing unprecedented
aridity. That means less water for our ecosystems--which in turn means
less water for our homes and our farmers, because we live in a deeply
interconnected world where changes to one system impact all others.
We rely on the natural world to provide us with many of the things
we depend on each day, from clean water and clean air to flood control
and coastal protection. At a time when these natural services are under
threat from global climate change, Americans will require strong
leadership to ensure that we are ready to adapt to these changes and to
meet these challenges.
Unfortunately, the Trump administration has failed to provide this
leadership. They see fit to pursue energy dominance at all costs; to
push an extractive and destructive agenda that has left our public
lands responsible for nearly one-quarter of all U.S. CO2
emissions. At the same time, the Administration has suppressed science
and prevented adaptation. They canceled Executive Orders outlining
adaptation strategies on public lands and even pulled back guidance on
climate change and national security. They ignore the science of
climate change, relying on outdated and inadequate mandates, and put
Americans in harm's way.
If this Administration will not take the lead, this Committee will.
Dr. Gonzalez will help us understand the threat we face by explaining
the impact climate change will have on our public lands. We will then
hear from a top climate change adaptation scientist, Dr. Lara Hansen,
because we can no longer afford to stand on the sidelines and do
nothing.
It is time for America to act on climate change, and our public
lands are one of the best resources for us to do so. Public lands
protect biodiversity and the ecosystems on which our daily lives
depend. They provide space for the natural world to adapt to the new
climate we have created. And they form the backbone of a nearly
trillion-dollar outdoor recreation economy that can help us create
good, clean jobs.
Climate change is an unprecedented challenge that will require big
and bold solutions. Today, we take the first step toward meaningful
action by hearing the risks we face and by considering how we can
prepare our communities, our country, and our public lands for the
challenges climate change presents.
Thank you all for joining me here today. I look forward to our
leadership on these issues.
Thank you again to the witnesses. I look forward to your testimony.
______
Ms. Haaland. I now recognize the Ranking Member, Mr.
Curtis, for his opening statement.
Mr. Curtis. Thank you very much. It is a pleasure to sit in
for our Ranking Member, Don Young. And on his behalf and all of
our behalf, I would like to congratulate Representative Haaland
on her election to the House of Representatives, and for being
selected as the new Chair of the National Parks, Forests, and
Public Lands Subcommittee.
I will now read Mr. Young's statement.
STATEMENT OF THE HON. DON YOUNG, A REPRESENTATIVE IN CONGRESS
FROM THE STATE OF ALASKA
Mr. Curtis. I look forward to working with her and this
Congress on the many important land issues facing our country.
Today, we meet to discuss the impacts of climate change on
our Federal lands and to examine adaptation opportunities. It
is certainly my hope that we will use this time to discuss
innovative land management solutions that fall under this
Subcommittee's jurisdiction.
All too often this issue has been used as a vehicle to push
a radically progressive agenda that would prove to be
devastating for American families, and would offer minimal, at
best, climate results. Among the policy goals that have been
expressed includes calls for complete elimination of air
travel, cows, and nuclear energy.
Fearmongering and unrealistic rhetoric should have no place
in this debate. Instead, we should focus on pragmatic solutions
that offer realistic environmental solutions.
And on that note, I would like to turn the microphone over
to Ranking Member Don Young to finish his statement.
[Laughter.]
Mr. Young. Madam Chair, I apologize.
Ms. Haaland. No need to apologize.
Mr. Young. I will say that those that live on the Hill have
it made. Those that live 25 miles out, it is not good. I hate
the traffic.
Ms. Haaland. We are happy to see you.
Mr. Young. I am here to--first, let me congratulate you for
being Chairman, and I do apologize. This is a very important
Committee.
I would say, seriously, we ought to start thinking about
reducing carbon emissions, but we also ought to be talking
about how do we address that in some of the areas which we have
been working on.
I think we have to look at the forests, something I am very
interested in, because we have the largest national forest in
America in Alaska. And we have lost use of that: 16.8 million
acres of the forest, only 4 percent has been managed for timber
production. And consequently, we have very large forests that
have dead trees. We have had that in other areas.
I can tell you that, in Alaska, because we did not manage,
did not harvest some trees--I am not saying all--we have lost
two pulp mills, five large sawmills, and a lot of small mills.
But we also lost 6,000 good, high-paying, middle-class jobs.
For what cause, I don't know. They say, we have to protect it.
But what we don't manage, we lose the forest. This has happened
in the Lower 48. People will talk to that, as we know.
Tremendous forest fires. It is a loss. And it also contributes
to the carbon, the gases in the air, and the particulate amount
in the air.
So, I suggest, respectfully, one of our jobs is to see
whether we can manage better, instead of saying no, ask what we
can do. Other countries have done beautifully. If you go to
Sweden, they have managed their forests for centuries, and they
produce a lot of timber and they employ a lot of people. And it
looks like a brand-new forest.
So, that is what we have to consider. And I do think this
is a great hearing. We have good witnesses today. There are
differences of opinion, but I just want us to adapt as part of
this hearing, and I am happy with what we are proceeding here.
I would submit the rest of my statement for the record and
yield back the balance of my time.
[The prepared statement of Mr. Young follows:]
Prepared Statement of the Hon. Don Young, Ranking Member, Subcommittee
on National Parks, Forests, and Public Lands
I would first like to congratulate Representative Haaland on her
election to the House of Representatives and for being selected as the
new Chair of the National Parks, Forests, and Public Lands
Subcommittee. I look forward to working with her this Congress on many
of the important land management issues facing our country.
Today we meet to discuss the impacts of climate change on our
Federal lands and to examine adaptation opportunities. It is certainly
my hope that we use this time to discuss innovative land management
solutions that fall under this Subcommittee's jurisdiction.
All too often, this issue has been used as a vehicle to push a
radically progressive agenda that would prove to be devastating for
American families and would offer minimal at best climate results.
Among the ludicrous policy goals that have been expressed includes
calls for the complete elimination of air travel, cows, and nuclear
energy.
Fearmongering and unrealistic rhetoric should have no place in this
debate. Instead we should focus on pragmatic solutions that offer
realistic environmental benefits.
One area of policy actually under this Committee's jurisdiction is
forestry. It's common knowledge that the poor health of our Nation's
forests is has reached crisis levels.
If the Democrat Majority is truly serious about reducing vast
amounts of Carbon Emissions into the atmosphere, they should be working
more closely alongside Republicans in supporting common-sense forest
management reforms which include the responsible cutting and replanting
of trees, as well as grazing on public lands.
Before our own eyes, we've seen the Nation's once flourishing
Federal forests transform into dead and burned out waste lands.
The sorry state of our Federal forests has become a national
disgrace and national emergency. While climate change has certainly
exacerbated the challenges facing our Federal forests, there is much
that we can be doing to help our forests adapt and become more
resilient in a time of changing climate.
With 16.8 million acres, the Tongass National Forest is the largest
national forest in the United States. In the last 90 years, only 4
percent has been managed for timber production. To make matters worse,
the Forest Service has been unwilling and unable to provide a reliable
and sufficient supply of timber sales.
In my home state of Alaska, over the past 35 years we have seen the
closure of two pulp mills, five large saw mills, and countless small
mills due to misguided forest policy. This has cost Alaskans over 5,000
good paying-family wage jobs.
For decades we have failed to proactively manage our forests in
order to reduce hazardous fuels buildup. As a result, the excessive
fuel loads that have piled up are increasing the likelihood of
explosive, unmanageable and costly megafires that wreak havoc on our
rural communities and emit millions of metric tons of carbon dioxide
into the air.
We cannot continue to ignore the forest health crisis. The Federal
Government's current rate, treating a paltry 2 percent of the nearly 60
million acres identified as high risk to wildfire, is not acceptable.
To solve our Nation's forest health crisis, we must enact measures
to increase the pace and scale of active management across our
forestlands.
The American people want our forests returned to health. They want
the growing scourge of wildfire brought back under control. They want
the destruction of mountain habitats by fire, disease and pestilence
arrested and reversed. They want the prosperity of their forest
communities restored.
Our witness, Dr. Elaine Oneil, has spent her career specializing in
forest health, climate change, and forest carbon accounting. Dr.
Oneil's written testimony offers reasonable solutions that would be
beneficial for our forests, for our climate, and for the American
people.
I look forward to a robust discussion on the state of our Federal
lands.
______
Ms. Haaland. Thank you very much, Mr. Curtis and Mr. Young.
I would like to introduce our witnesses. Under our
Committee Rules, oral statements are limited to 5 minutes, but
your entire statement will appear in the hearing record.
The lights in front of you will turn yellow when there is 1
minute left, and then red when time has expired. After the
witnesses have testified, Members will be given the opportunity
to ask questions.
The Chair now recognizes Dr. Patrick Gonzalez for 5
minutes.
STATEMENT OF PATRICK GONZALEZ, ASSOCIATE ADJUNCT PROFESSOR,
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA-BERKELEY, BERKELEY, CALIFORNIA
Dr. Gonzalez. Chairwoman, Ranking Member, and members of
the Committee, thank you for the invitation to speak on the
science of human-caused climate change in the U.S. national
parks.
I am Patrick Gonzalez, a forest ecologist and associate
adjunct professor at the University of California, Berkeley. I
am also the principal climate change scientist of the U.S.
National Park Service. But today I speak under my Berkeley
affiliation, not for the Park Service.
I have conducted and published field research on climate
change for over 25 years. I have also served as a lead author
on four reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate
Change, the science organization awarded a share of the 2007
Nobel Peace Prize.
Wildfires burning in Yosemite National Park in California,
glaciers melting in Glacier Bay National Park in Alaska:
published scientific research has detected these changes and
others in U.S. national parks, and attributed them to human-
caused climate change.
The human cause of climate change is an important
scientific fact because it points us to the solutions to the
problem. Measurements show that cars, power plants,
deforestation, and other human sources have increased carbon
dioxide to its highest levels in 800,000 years. This increase
has intensified the greenhouse effect, and increased
temperatures to their highest levels in over 800 years. Human
activities have caused 97 percent of historical heating.
Colleagues and I published last year the first analysis of
climate change trends across all 417 national parks. Our
results revealed that climate change since 1895 has exposed the
national parks to conditions hotter and dryer than the country,
as a whole. Temperatures in the national parks increased at
double the national rate. The temperature increase was 1 degree
Celsius, or 2 degrees Fahrenheit per century.
That might not sound like a lot, but 1 degree is the
equivalent of pushing a mountain down 170 meters, or 550 feet--
that is the height of the Washington Monument--from cooler
areas at higher elevations to warmer areas below.
Also, rain and snow decreased more in the national parks
than in the country as a whole. Hotter and drier conditions
occurred because many parks are located in the extreme
environments: in the Arctic, in high mountains, and the arid
Southwest.
As a result, in Glacier Bay National Park in Alaska,
climate change has melted 640 meters of ice from Muir Glacier.
That's 2,100 feet more than the height of One World Trade
Center.
In Yosemite National Park and across the West, climate
change has doubled wildfire, compared to the area of natural
burning.
In Rocky Mountain National Park and across the West,
climate change has doubled tree death, particularly from bark
beetles.
In Noatak National Preserve in Alaska, climate change has
shifted forests northward onto formerly treeless tundra.
Climate change has raised sea level halfway to your knee in
Golden Gate National Recreation Area in San Francisco, and all
the way to your knee in New York City, not far from the Statue
of Liberty.
Climate change has killed coral reefs in Biscayne National
Park, Florida.
Continued climate change under the worst scenario could
substantially heat the parks and the future up to 9 degrees
Celsius or 16 degrees Fahrenheit in Alaska.
Our research shows that cutting carbon pollution could
reduce projected heating in national parks by up to two-thirds.
The lowered heating would lower future risks.
The United States has demonstrated its ability to cut
emissions. The United States cut emissions 8 percent from 2007
to 2015. The U.S. Climate Alliance of 19 states and 1 territory
has cut its emissions 14 percent, on track to meet the Paris
Agreement goals. We achieved this progress with energy
conservation, energy efficiency, solar, public transit, and
other sustainable actions.
In conclusion, the U.S. national parks protect some of the
most irreplaceable natural areas and cultural sites in the
world. Cutting carbon pollution would reduce human-caused
climate change and help save our national parks for future
generations. Thank you.
[The prepared statement of Dr. Gonzalez follows:]
Prepared Statement of Patrick Gonzalez, Ph.D., University of
California, Berkeley
executive summary
From wildfires burning in Yosemite National Park, California, to
glaciers melting in Glacier Bay National Park, Alaska, published
scientific research has detected changes globally and in United States
(U.S.) national parks and attributed them to human-caused climate
change. These impacts are occurring because climate change since 1895
has exposed the national parks to twice the heating of the country as a
whole and to more severe aridity. Without cuts to pollution from cars,
power plants, deforestation, and other human sources, continued climate
change could increase future temperatures up to six times faster than
historical rates, threatening the unique landscapes, plants, and
animals in parks. Adaptation of resource management could decrease some
projected damage. Yet, cutting carbon pollution from human sources is
the solution that targets the cause of climate change. Emissions
reductions could lower projected heating in national parks by one-half
to two-thirds. The lowered heating would reduce risks of severe
wildfire, disappearances of plant and animal species, and other threats
to our national parks.
introduction
Chairwoman, Ranking Member, and members of the Committee, thank you
for the invitation to speak on the science of human-caused climate
change in the U.S. national parks. I am Patrick Gonzalez, a forest
ecologist and Associate Adjunct Professor at the University of
California, Berkeley, in the Department of Environmental Science,
Policy, and Management. I am also the Principal Climate Change
Scientist of the U.S. National Park Service, but today I am speaking
under my Berkeley affiliation, not for the Park Service. I earned my
Ph.D. at the University of California, Berkeley, and have conducted and
published field research on climate change for 25 years. I have also
served for over 8 years as the lead for climate change science in the
U.S. National Park Service. I am a lead author on four reports of the
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the organization that
produces the authoritative scientific assessments of climate change,
for which it was awarded a share of the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize.
human cause of climate change
The human cause of climate change (1) is an important scientific
fact because it points us to solutions to the problem. Atmospheric
measurements show that carbon dioxide has increased to its highest
level in 800,000 years (Figure 1) (2-5). Measurements show that the
increased carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases in the atmosphere
come from cars, power plants, deforestation, and other human sources
(6). Chemical analyses show that the additional carbon dioxide bears
the unique chemical signature of fossil fuels--coal, oil, and gas--not
of natural emissions from volcanoes (7). Human sources now emit twice
the amount of carbon dioxide that vegetation, soils, and the oceans can
naturally absorb (6). This is the fundamental imbalance that causes
climate change.
The increase in carbon dioxide has intensified the greenhouse
effect, the trapping of heat close to the surface of the Earth.
Consequently, the world has heated to its highest temperature in 800
years (8). Measurements of the potential causal factors--human and
natural--show that carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases from human
activities caused 97 percent of historical heating (9). Solar cycles
and other natural factors caused just the remaining 3 percent.
Therefore, scientific evidence shows that human activities are causing
climate change.
[GRAPHIC NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT]
Figure 1. Atmospheric carbon dioxide 800,000 years ago to 2018 AD.
historical impacts in u.s. national parks
The magnitude of climate change across all the U.S. national parks
was not known until recent research by colleagues and me. In 2018, we
published the first spatial analyses of temperature and precipitation
trends across all 417 U.S. national parks (10). Our analyses of
historical data revealed that climate change has exposed the national
parks to conditions hotter and drier than the country as a whole. This
occurs because extensive parts of the parks are in extreme
environments--the Arctic, high mountains, and the arid Southwest.
Our findings show that temperatures in the national park area
increased at a rate of 1+C (approximately 2+F.) per century from 1895
to 2010, double the national rate. At the same time, precipitation
decreased across a greater fraction of the national park area (12
percent) than the country as a whole (3 percent). Out of all 417
national parks, temperatures increased most in Denali National
Preserve, Alaska (4.3+C [approximately 8+F.] per century) (Figure 2),
and rainfall declined most in Honouliuli National Monument, Hawaii (85
percent decrease per century).
The implications of this increased heat and aridity in the national
parks were not comprehensively known until recently. In 2017, I
published the first comprehensive assessment of published research on
climate change impacts and vulnerabilities in U.S. national parks (11).
This section on historical impacts provides cases from that
publication, only including research that has employed the research
procedures of detection and attribution (1).
Detection is the finding of statistically significant changes over
time that are different than natural variation. Attribution is the
analysis of different potential causes, natural and human, to determine
their relative importance. In many national parks, it is easier to tell
if human-caused climate change is the main cause of changes in the
field because many parks have been protected from urbanization, timber
harvesting, grazing, and other non-climate disturbances.
[GRAPHIC NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT]
Figure 2. Temperature change from 1895 to 2010 due to human-caused
climate change. Map: Trend in annual temperature in degrees Celsius per
century, with park boundaries in green. Graph: Statistically
significant trend for the area of the 417 U.S. national parks.
Historical impacts detected and attributed to human-caused climate
change include:
Glaciers melting In Glacier Bay National Park (NP),
Alaska, climate change melted 640 meters (2100 ft.) of ice
(depth) from Muir Glacier from 1948 to 2000 (Figure 3)
(12,13). In Glacier NP, Montana, climate change melted 1.5
km (1 mi.) of ice (length) from Agassiz Glacier from 1926
to 1979 (13,14). In the North Cascades NP complex,
Washington, climate change melted four glaciers away
completely from 1984 to 2004 (13,15).
[GRAPHIC] [TIFF OMITTED] T5200.003
.epsFigure 3. Melting of Muir Glacier, Glacier Bay National Park,
Alaska. Top: August 13, 1941 (photo by William O. Field, U.S.
Geological Survey). Bottom: August 31, 2004 (photo by Bruce F. Molnia,
U.S. Geological Survey).
Snowpack decline Across the western U.S., including North
Cascades NP, Washington, and 10 other national parks,
climate change has melted snowpack to its lowest level in
eight centuries (16).
Wildfire increase Across the western U.S., including
Yellowstone NP, Wyoming, and Yosemite NP, California,
climate change doubled the area burned by wildfire from
1984 to 2015, compared to the area of natural burning (17).
Wildfire is a natural part of many ecosystems but excessive
wildfire can damage ecosystem integrity and hurt people.
Across the western U.S., climate was the dominant factor
controlling burning from 1916 to 2003, even during periods
of active fire suppression (18).
Tree death Across the western U.S., including Kings Canyon
NP, Lassen Volcanic NP, Sequoia NP, and Yosemite NP,
California, Mount Rainier NP, Washington, and Rocky
Mountain NP, Colorado, climate change doubled tree
mortality from 1955 to 2007 (19), due to increased aridity
(19,20), the most extensive bark beetle infestations in a
century (19-22), and increased wildfire (20).
Vegetation shifts In Yosemite NP, California, climate
change shifted subalpine forest upslope into subalpine
meadows between 1880 and 2002 (23). In Noatak National
Preserve, Alaska, climate change shifted boreal conifer
forest northward onto formerly treeless tundra between 1800
and 1990 (24). Climate change, by shifting warmer
conditions upslope and farther north, has shifted major
vegetation types (biomes) at sites around the world (25).
Wildlife shifts In Yosemite NP, California, field research
showed that climate change shifted the ranges of the
American pika, a small alpine mammal, and other species 500
meters upslope (approximately 1600 ft.) from 1920 to 2006,
when temperature increased 3+C (approximately 5+F) (26).
Because the national park had protected the survey area,
timber harvesting, grazing, and hunting were not major
factors.
Analyses of Audubon Christmas Bird Count data across the U.S.,
including sites in numerous national parks, found that
climate change shifted the average winter range of 254 bird
species northward 15 km (9 mi.) from 1975 to 2004 (27).
Because of this, the evening grosbeak disappeared from
counts in Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore, Michigan,
and Shenandoah NP, Virginia.
Sea level rise Climate change has raised sea level 22 cm
(9 in.) since 1854 at Golden Gate National Recreation Area,
San Francisco, California (28-30), 42 cm (17 in.) since
1856 at New York City (29-31), not far from the Statue of
Liberty National Monument, and 30 cm (12 in.) since 1924 at
Washington, DC (29,30,32), not far from the Jefferson
Memorial and the White House, which is a national park.
Coral bleaching Climate change bleached and killed up to
80 percent of coral reef area in 2005 at sites in Biscayne
NP, Florida, and Buck Island Reef National Monument, Salt
River Bay National Historical Park and Ecological Preserve,
Virgin Islands National Park, and Virgin Islands Coral Reef
National Monument (33,34). That year, climate change had
caused the hottest sea surface temperatures recorded in the
Caribbean Sea since 1855.
future vulnerabilities
To quantify potential future changes in national parks, colleagues
and I analyzed all available climate projections from the
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, as part of the first spatial
analysis of climate trends across all 417 U.S. national parks (10). Our
results indicate that continued carbon emissions under the worst
scenario could increase temperatures in the 21st century six times
faster than occurred in the 20th century. Temperatures in national
parks could increase up to 9+C (16+F.) by 2100, in the national parks
of Alaska, and rainfall could decline by as much as 28 percent, in the
national parks of the U.S. Virgin Islands. Aridity could also increase
in Big Bend NP, Texas, Everglades NP, Florida, and other national parks
at southern latitudes.
Published research on U.S. national park resources indicates that
continued climate change could damage many of the globally unique
ecosystems and resources that the parks protect. These vulnerabilities
include:
Loss of glaciers Climate change could cause, under the
worst scenario, complete melting of glaciers from Glacier
National Park, Montana, by the 2030s (35) and the
disappearance of Sperry Glacier from Rocky Mountain NP by
the 2040s (36).
Wildfire increase The hotter temperatures of climate
change could, under a high emissions scenario, increase
wildfire frequencies in Yellowstone NP and Grand Teton NP,
Wyoming, 300 percent to 1000 percent (37) and up to 300
percent in Yosemite NP, California, by 2100 (38).
Tree death The more severe aridity of climate change
could, under a high emissions scenario, reduce suitable
habitat of the Joshua tree in the southwestern U.S. 90
percent by 2100, leading to extensive death of Joshua trees
in Joshua Tree NP, California (39,40). The more severe
aridity of climate change also increases the risk of higher
mortality of foothills palo verde and ocotillo in Saguaro
NP, Arizona (41), pinon pine in Bandelier National
Monument, New Mexico (42), and coast redwoods, the tallest
living things on Earth, in Muir Woods National Monument,
California (43,44). Loss of snow under projected climate
change increases the vulnerability of Alaska yellow cedar
to increased mortality in Sitka National Historical Park,
Alaska (45). Under projected climate change, 16 percent to
41 percent of total national park area is highly
vulnerability to northward and upslope vegetation shifts
(biome shifts) (25).
Loss of wildlife Climate change may shift habitats upslope
to such an extent that the American pika, a small alpine
mammal that lives at the highest elevations, could
disappear from Lassen Volcanic NP, California (46). Climate
change could also exacerbate cheatgrass invasions in
Craters of the Moon National Monument and Preserve, Idaho,
leading to substantial decline of the sage grouse (47,48).
Numerous national parks could lose local bird species and
be colonized by new migrants (49). At Canaveral National
Seashore, Florida, green turtles are vulnerable to
increased mortality from flooding of nests by increases in
storms (50).
Inundation from sea level rise Sea level rise due to
climate change could inundate much of Everglades National
Park, Florida (51), the center of Golden Gate National
Recreation Area, California (52,53), the National Mall and
other national parks in Washington, DC (54), one-third of
the area of Assateague Island National Seashore, Maryland
(55), and the Statue of Liberty National Monument, New York
(56).
Ocean acidification Corals and other marine life in Dry
Tortugas National Park, Florida (57), and Channel Islands
NP and Cabrillo National Monument, California (58), are
vulnerable to dissolving in acidified waters under
continued climate change.
adaptation of natural resource management
Adaptation to climate change is the adjustment of practices in a
way that moderates future harm. One adaptation measure under
implementation in a national park is the protection of refugia for the
Joshua tree in Joshua Tree NP, California (40). Other adaptation
measures under consideration for parks include conservation of refugia
for mountain plants and animals (59,60), and conservation of cooler
water refugia for fish (61). Prescribed burning is an adaptation
measure that reduces future risks of catastrophic wildfire and tree
death by removing an unnatural buildup of fuel and small trees where
old policies suppressed natural wildfire (62,63). While adaptation
measures are important to help maintain ecosystem integrity, they only
treat symptoms of climate change, not the cause.
carbon solutions
Published research by colleagues and me concludes that reducing the
cause of climate change--carbon pollution from cars, power plants,
deforestation, and other human sources--can save national parks from
the most extreme heat in the future (10). Compared to the worst
scenario, reduced carbon emissions would lower projected heating in
national parks by one-half to two-thirds by 2100.
The reduced heating could produce real benefits on the ground.
While under the worst emissions scenario, 16 percent of plant and
animal species globally could be at risk of extinction (64), the risk
drops to 5 percent under the lowest emissions scenario of meeting the
Paris Agreement goal (65). Similarly, global sea level could rise 74 cm
(29 in.) under the worst emissions scenario, but rise 44 m (17 in.)
under the Paris Agreement goal (29). In Yosemite NP, California,
climate change under the worst emissions scenario could triple burned
area by 2100, but a low emissions scenario could keep wildfires near to
their current level (38).
A supplemental carbon solution is the conservation of forests,
which naturally reduce climate change by removing carbon dioxide from
the atmosphere and storing it in leaves and wood. Coast redwood forest
near Redwood NP, California, contains more carbon per area on the
ground than any other forest in the world (66). The 27 national parks
in California together contain as much carbon as the annual emissions
of 7.4 million Americans, or the combined population of the cities of
Boston, Charlotte, Dallas, Kansas City, Los Angeles, and Miami (67).
This is a substantial amount of carbon, but those millions of people
can burn the equivalent of all the carbon in the coast redwoods and
other vegetation in the national parks in California in just one year.
Therefore, forest conservation is insufficient as a sole solution to
climate change. This points to the need for reducing emissions from
fossil fuel burning.
Analyses by the IPCC recently confirmed that it is still possible
to limit future heating to the Paris Agreement goal of a temperature
increase less than 2+C (approximately 4+F) (68). The U.S. has already
demonstrated its ability to cut emissions. From 2007 to 2015, the U.S.
cut emissions 8 percent (69). From 2005 to 2016, the U.S. Climate
Alliance of 19 states and one territory cut its emissions 14 percent,
on track to meet the Paris Agreement goal (70). We have achieved this
progress through energy conservation, improved efficiency, renewable
energy, public transit, and other available practices.
The U.S. national parks protect some of the most irreplaceable
natural areas and cultural sites in the world. Cutting carbon pollution
would reduce human-caused climate change and help save our national
parks for future generations.
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Publications and information by Patrick Gonzalez at http://
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patrick-gonzalez, and https://twitter.com/pgonzaleztweet.
______
Ms. Haaland. Thank you, Dr. Gonzalez.
The Chair now recognizes Dr. Lara Hansen.
STATEMENT OF LARA HANSEN, EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR AND CHIEF
SCIENTIST, EcoAdapt, BAINBRIDGE ISLAND, WASHINGTON
Dr. Hansen. Good morning, and thank you, Ms. Chairwoman,
Ranking Member, and the Committee, for inviting me to speak
about climate change and our public lands. I have had the honor
to visit the Hill twice before to talk about climate change,
first in 2004, when I was pregnant with my son. And I talked
about the hopeful work I was conducting around the world to
improve ecosystem management in the face of climate change: a
discipline called adaptation. I urged the Senate to reduce
greenhouse gas emissions and keep climate change to less than 2
degrees Celsius.
In 2007, I was invited back to testify on the effects of
climate change on marine ecosystems. My son was now three. I
applauded Congress for the existence of several bills to reduce
greenhouse gas emissions. I repeated the need to keep climate
change to less than 2 degrees Celsius, and I added a request
for the creation of a national adaptation policy with an
extension agency to provide technical support.
The following year, two colleagues and I co-founded
EcoAdapt, in order to bring the skills we were supporting
internationally to the United States, so our own country could
become more durable to the insults of climate change.
A decade later EcoAdapt is now a team of 12 supporting the
innovation of adaptation approaches across the United States.
We see a growing number of people incorporating the realities
of climate change into their work, but not nearly to the extent
necessary.
We host the biennial National Adaptation Forum, and in 2017
we had over 1,000 attendees. We are a country of 325 million.
Certainly, we need more than 1,000 people doing this work. Our
country is utterly unprepared for the scale of this challenge.
In every one of your districts, there are decisions being
made every day, not only on public lands, but also on private
lands and in our communities that are vulnerable to climate
change. Not considering the implications of climate change will
result in investments in infrastructure, management, and
protection that will not garner the anticipated outcomes.
Instead, we will end up spending additional funds to rebuild,
risking community members' lives and livelihoods, and doing
damage to our environment. Explicit consideration of climate
change and our actions today is vital for our lives tomorrow.
As lawmakers, you have the power to do something. For my 20
years of professional experience in the field of adaptation, I
recommend the following.
One, create a national adaptation policy that requires the
consideration of the impacts from and to climate change, and
evaluation of funding and permitting for land use activities
and, quite frankly, everything else.
Two, create a national climate change adaptation and
mitigation extension agency. This would provide technical
support to public and private land managers and everyone else
at the Federal, state, and local level.
Three, require the protection and management of our public
lands with an awareness that the climate is changing. This
means the agencies entrusted to protect our public lands must
evaluate the climate change vulnerability of ecosystems and the
actions proposed on these lands such that they can act to
reduce that risk. This needs to be part of how we do business.
We must ensure that we are protecting adequate and
appropriate space for ecosystems to function under changing
conditions, including protecting refugia, connectivity,
functionality, and employing forward restoration.
We must support our land stewards with the staff and
funding to monitor and evaluate the effectiveness of
management, and give them the ability to make management
decisions that prepare us for future conditions.
We must manage lands for the long term, to maximize our
rate of return, which will be realized as access to clean air,
clean and plentiful water, flood control, wildlife habitat,
improved mental health, spiritual opportunities, recreational
enjoyment, and long-term jobs. Our public lands must not be
managed for quarterly profit margins.
Four, re-evaluate acceptable levels of non-climate
stressors on our public lands. From roads or invasive species,
to over-harvest or eutrophication, to industrial chemicals from
gas extraction and mining, or chemical fire suppressants, the
impact of these stressors can be compounded by the
manifestations of climate change.
And, of course, since that child I spoke about at the
beginning of my testimony is now a teenager, I know that I
often have to repeat myself to get action, such as emptying the
dish rack. So, here it goes.
Number 5, keep global climate change to well below 2
degrees Celsius. Actually, we now know that 1.5 degrees Celsius
is the more prudent target. We need to reduce our national
consumption and production of fossil fuels to stop making the
problem worse. The cost of inaction is unaffordable for us and
our children.
I am delighted that Congress and this Committee are again
taking up the issue of climate change. This time let's do
something to increase the likelihood of good outcomes. Let's
act now. Thank you.
[The prepared statement of Dr. Hansen follows:]
Prepared Statement of Dr. Lara J. Hansen, Chief Scientist and Executive
Director, EcoAdapt
Protecting our public lands is a critical part of an adaptation
strategy that not only safeguards these areas and the ecosystems that
inhabit them, but also the ecosystem services upon which our citizens
rely. Investment in the protection of public lands may be our best path
to enduring access to clean air, clean and plentiful water, flood
control, wildlife habitat, improved mental health, spiritual heritage,
and recreational enjoyment. In my testimony I will introduce you to the
ways by which we can increase the resilience of our public lands in the
face of climate change and what we need to make this happen.
I would like to begin by providing some context. I am the head of a
non-profit organization that is filling a very large gap--creating a
climate-savvy society by innovating, facilitating and training
practitioners in adaptation solutions. EcoAdapt's \1\ sole focus is to
``meet the challenges of climate change.'' That means helping everyone
from foresters and marine protected area managers to city planners and
public health officials apply a climate lens through which to evaluate
their work and develop solutions that will allow them to succeed in
meeting their mandate even as the world is changing around them. We do
this through four programs. Our State of Adaptation program takes a
research approach to assessing what activities people are undertaking,
what is working and what is preventing success. Our Climate Adaptation
Knowledge Exchange is the largest adaptation resource database. It is
available via an online, open access portal (CAKEx.org) \2\ that is
accessed by thousands of people from around the world each month.
Awareness to Action is our workshop methodology that has provided
hands-on training in climate change adaptation to over 6,000
individuals representing hundreds of organizations and agencies across
the country (and a few around the world). Finally, our National
Adaptation Forum \3\ is a biennial convening of adaptation
professionals that affords the opportunity for the exchange of ideas
and the innovation of the next generation of climate solutions.
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\1\ http://ecoadapt.org/.
\2\ https://www.cakex.org/.
\3\ https://www.nationaladaptationforum.org/.
In the past 10 years, my team at EcoAdapt has learned a lot about
good adaptation practice--on the ground and through government support.
I'd like to share some of that with you today. My hope is that you will
see the importance of supporting this type of work in your own
Districts and through the Federal mechanisms that can help to make all
of our lands and communities climate savvy. Because the effects of
climate change that are being felt today will continue and intensify
for centuries or millennia to come, every day we are afforded the
opportunity to make management and planning decisions that either help
us prepare for these changes or leave us more and more vulnerable.
Let's take the path that leads to a better future. A path on which we
take both mitigation (reducing the greenhouse gases that cause climate
change) and adaptation (preparing for and responding to the climate
change impacts that are unavoidable due to past emissions) seriously.
These are not choices to be played against each other--both are
necessary responses to climate change. Doing one without the other will
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lead us to a false sense of failure.
Ignoring climate change in the management of National Parks,
forests and other public lands is not an option. It was not an option
the first time I testified before a congressional committee (Senate
Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation) in March 2004,
almost exactly 15 years ago, when atmospheric CO2 was 378
ppm and global temperature had increased 0.6 degrees Celsius. Yet we
did not take action. It was not an option when I testified in 2007 to
the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation's
Subcommittee on Oceans, Atmosphere, Fisheries, and Coast Guard, when
atmospheric CO2 was 386 ppm. And still we did not change our
trajectory. Today atmospheric CO2 has reached 410 ppm and
global temperature has risen 1 degree Celsius. I am back today hoping
that we are ready to fully address this massive problem with the level
of action it requires. The best place to start is somewhere, so let's
start by taking action on our public lands.
how can we increase the resilience of public lands in the face of
climate change?
Public lands are the places where plants and animals thrive, where
they have the space to move and grow. They are vital for providing
intact ecosystems and connectivity, supporting high biodiversity and
healthy species. Public lands also provide critical ecosystem services
upon which neighboring and non-neighboring communities, non-local
visitors, and others have come to rely. In particular, public lands
provide abundant fresh water for human and environmental uses; building
materials and other wood products; forage for livestock; clean air;
water filtration and maintenance of water quality; protection from
wildfire, floods, and erosion; carbon sequestration; recreational
opportunities; aesthetic values from scenery; spiritual and religious
values; and cultural heritage.
Climate change presents a significant threat to our public lands
and the services that they provide. Resilient public lands enable
species and ecosystems and the services they provide to rebound in the
face of rapid environmental change. We can increase the resilience of
public lands by implementing a number of well-understood practices,
including incorporating climate change impacts and adaptation into all
planning efforts, improving regional coordination, assessing the
effectiveness of adaptation actions and implementing those that
represent the ``best bets'' under changing climate conditions,
protecting adequate and appropriate space, reducing local and regional
climate change and non-climate stressors, and reducing the rate and
extent of climate change. By implementing these practices, we are
safeguarding the species, ecosystems, and services that we not only
hold dear but are essential to our way of life.
Incorporate climate change impacts and adaptation into all planning
efforts. Incorporating climate change into planning efforts can take
the form of discrete ``climate action or adaptation plans'' or the
direct integration of climate change into existing planning processes.
For example, through our vulnerability assessment and adaptation
planning methodologies, EcoAdapt helps natural resource managers from
state and Federal agencies evaluate how the species and habitats they
manage are vulnerable to climate change, reassess and revise their
current actions and projects to address vulnerabilities, and identify
new actions to integrate into future projects. Some examples include
work in California and the Hawaiian Islands.
EcoAdapt, in collaboration with numerous other partners, worked
with the Greater Farallones National Marine Sanctuary (located along
the north-central California coast and ocean) to evaluate vulnerability
of their species, habitats, and ecosystem services to climate change
and create a Climate Adaptation Plan.\4\ The region's natural resources
and the services they provide are vulnerable to increasing ocean
temperatures, sea level rise, and extreme weather events (winds, waves,
storms). The plan integrates climate adaptation into existing
management frameworks and recommends over 75 adaptation strategies for
regional management agencies to take to enhance coastal resilience,
including implementing living shorelines, protecting and restoring
habitat, limiting human disturbance, addressing invasive species,
promoting education, and investing in science needs.
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\4\ Hutto, S. 2016. Climate-Smart Adaptation for the North-central
California Coast and Ocean. Ed. Rachel M. Gregg [Case study on a
project of the Greater Farallones National Marine Sanctuary]. Retrieved
from CAKE: https://www.cakex.org/case-studies/climate-smart-adaptation-
north-central-california-coast-and-ocean.
In Southern California, EcoAdapt worked with natural resource
managers to re-examine the Ojai Community Defense Zone Project, which
planned to restore and expand fuel-breaks in chaparral habitats
adjacent to multiple human communities.\5\ Chaparral habitats, as well
as adjacent communities, are vulnerable to increased wildfire severity
and increased extreme precipitation events projected under climate
change. Increasing human populations may exacerbate these impacts, as
fire ignitions in the region are primarily human-caused. While a number
of existing management actions help to alleviate climate impacts,
resource managers identified new actions to integrate into future
projects. For example, planting native perennial grasses within fuel-
breaks to reduce invasive grass establishment (invasive grasses
contribute to more severe wildfires) and establishing trigger points
for recreation closures and restrictions (helps reduce the number of
human-caused ignitions).
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\5\ Kershner, J.M., L.E. Hilberg, and W.A. Reynier. 2017. The Ojai
Community Defense Zone Project: A Southern California Climate Change
Adaptation Case Study. Retrieved from CAKE: https://www.cakex.org/case-
studies/ojai-community-defense-zone-project-southern-california-
climate-change-adaptation-case-study.
In Hawaii, after going through a vulnerability assessment-
adaptation planning process \6\ with EcoAdapt, managers from the Plant
Extinction Prevention Program decided to shift the amount of seeds they
plant vs. store in response to projected climate threats such as
increased drought risk and altered precipitation amount and timing.
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\6\ Gregg, R.M., editor. 2018. Hawaiian Islands Climate
Vulnerability and Adaptation Synthesis. EcoAdapt, Bainbridge Island,
WA. http://bit.ly/HawaiiClimate.
Improve regional coordination. Improving coordination helps
increase the resilience of public lands and associated ecosystem
services by providing opportunities to leverage resources (e.g.,
funding, data, people time), building buy-in and support for plans and
on-the-ground projects, improving communication about planned and
ongoing activities, and providing a shared understanding of threats,
solutions, and priorities. For example, the Flagstaff Watershed
Protection Project is a partnership effort between the state of
Arizona, city of Flagstaff, and Coconino National Forest to help reduce
the risk of devastating wildfire and post-fire flooding in neighboring
watersheds.\7\ In 2010, the Schultz Fire in Coconino National Forest
severely burned thousands of acres of steep terrain; over 20 major
flash flooding events occurred after the fire, destroying community
drinking water and costing over $130 million in damages. Increased fire
severity and extreme precipitation events are projected to continue
with climate change, requiring targeted forest restoration work and
collaboration to reduce the risk of fire and flooding and subsequent
impacts on the community. This project is one of only a handful of
examples where restoration work on a national forest is being funded
primarily by a municipality.
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\7\ Flagstaff Watershed Protection Project: http://
flagstaffwatershedprotection.org.
The Northern California Climate Adaptation Project is a multi-
stakeholder, collaborative effort to assess the impacts of climate
change on and co-develop adaptation strategies and actions for habitats
and species of northwestern California.\8\ The USDA Forest Service and
Bureau of Land Management manage over 6 million acres of public lands
in the region, and plan to use findings from this project to inform
revisions of their land management plans. Many tribes occur within or
around these public lands and are affected by management decisions made
by these two entities. Tribal input and participation have been
critically important in this project, helping to identify potential
conflicts with adaptation options. For example, increasing the use of
prescribed burning reduces the likelihood of high-severity wildfires (a
current and future threat to the region) however, increased burning in
the spring has the potential to conflict with cultural values and site
use during the season. Explicitly incorporating tribal considerations
into adaptation planning can help build buy-in for management actions
on public lands and enhance the resilience of neighboring tribal
communities.
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\8\ Northern California Climate Adaptation Project: http://
ecoadapt.org/programs/adaptation-consultations/norcal.
Assess adaptation effectiveness. The importance of making informed
decisions to alleviate the environmental, financial, and emotional
costs of climate change cannot be overstated. Climate change presents a
variety of impacts to which managers and planners must respond, ranging
from habitat restoration and designation of protected areas to
increased public education and outreach and broad policy changes.
Several adaptation case studies and guidebooks have been released in
recent years with recommendations of suitable adaptation actions to
address different climate impact concerns. However, determining when,
where and how a particular action may be best implemented is more
difficult to discern. Synthesizing what has worked and what has not
worked, as well as why, can help identify potential modifications to
current management practices and facilitate understanding of the
consequences of decisions. Further, science- and evidence-based
decision making supports better management outcomes, while reducing
costs and lowering the risk of implementing policies that may be based
on well-intentioned but insufficient research. In addition to improving
overall practice, a better understanding of which actions can be most
effectively applied in different settings helps managers identify and
leverage funding opportunities and create new or enhance existing
partnerships to advance climate adaptation. Evaluating the science
behind management approaches of the past to determine their usefulness
under changing climate conditions is an evolving area of research by
EcoAdapt. We have embarked on an effort to evaluate the body of
scientific knowledge supporting specific climate adaptation actions to
determine the conditions under which particular actions may be most
effective for achieving management goals. Since 2014, we have assessed
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wildfire, sea level rise, and ecological drought adaptation options.
Protect open space. Protecting adequate and appropriate space,
including identifying and protecting areas of climate refugia (places
with more stable climatic conditions, current and/or future),
connectivity and corridors, and/or the geophysical setting continues to
be a critical strategy for increasing the resilience of public
lands.9,10 Protecting habitats and areas of refugia provide
a safe haven that species can retreat to and/or persist in under
climate change, and ensures that important ecosystem services continue
to be available. For example, protecting habitats such as headwater
streams or groundwater sources may be critical for maintaining water
supply that human communities depend on. Similarly, protecting
geophysical settings may help maintain regional biodiversity with
climate change.
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\9\ Hansen, L.J. and J.R. Hoffman. 2011. Climate Savvy: Adapting
Conservation and Resource Management to a Changing World. Island Press,
Washington, DC.
\10\ Hansen, L.J., et al. 2010. Adapting conservation to climate
change. Conservation Biology. 24:63-68.
Reduce local and regional climate change, as well as non-climate
stressors. Reducing local and regional climate change and minimizing
non-climate stressors are key to increasing the resilience of public
lands.\11\ In some cases, it may be possible to reduce local or
regional climate changes. For example, replanting riparian vegetation
along streams can limit water temperature increases and help keep water
in the system. Non-climate stressors have the potential to exacerbate
(or be exacerbated by) climate impacts. For example, invasive grasses
alter the availability and continuity of fire fuels, contributing to
more severe wildfires.
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\11\ Hansen, L.J. and J.R. Hoffman. 2011. Climate Savvy: Adapting
Conservation and Resource Management to a Changing World. Island Press,
Washington, DC.
Restoration of habitat structure, function, and processes continues
to be one of the best ways to address both climate and non-climate
stressors. However, it is not enough to engage in restoration
activities as we have done in the past and, in fact, ``restoring''
ecosystems to some former state will likely make them ill-equipped to
deal with the challenges of climate change. Instead, restoration
activities now need to be designed with climate impacts integrated from
the start. For example, planting drought-tolerant native species in
areas projected to get drier rather than planting the species that have
historically been there under wetter conditions, or implementing a
landscape-scale approach that combines thinning, prescribed burning,
and managed wildfire to reduce tree densities and understory vegetation
in an area projected to see more high-severity fires, rather than
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relying only on forest thinning.
Wildfires, particularly in the West, are increasing in frequency
and severity. With increasing air temperatures and decreasing summer
soil moisture levels, the probability of widespread, catastrophic
wildfires continues to rise, threatening habitats, species, and public
health and safety.12,13 Several approaches are used to
manage wildfire risk, including prescribed fire, thinning, mechanical
fuel treatments, and wildfire managed for multiple objectives. For
example, prescribed fire has been used for decades to reduce fuel
loads, promote more open and diverse forest structure, maintain or
increase biodiversity, and preserve defensible space around
infrastructure and human communities.\14\ As a climate adaptation
action, prescribed fire reduces the risk of catastrophic or stand-
replacing fire by targeting and reducing surface and ladder fuels,
allows for the re-introduction of natural fire regimes, and prepares
the landscape for the re-establishment of fire-tolerant native species
that may be better adapted to shifting fire regimes.13,15
Managers are already modifying their use of prescribed fire in
responses to changing conditions, such as earlier spring burn windows,
although institutional and sociopolitical constraints, such as a lack
of funding and trained staff, liability issues, and public acceptance
of smoke, limit its application across the landscape.13
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\12\ Westerling, A., et al. 2006. Warming and earlier spring
increase western U.S. forest wildfire activity. Science (313)5789: 940-
943. DOI: 10.1126/science.1128834.
\13\ Gregg, R.M., et al. 2016. Available Science Assessment
Project: Prescribed Fire and Climate Change in Northwest National
Forests. Report to the Department of the Interior's Northwest Climate
Science Center.
\14\ Scott, G., et al. 2013. Reforestation-Revegetation Climate
Change Primer: Incorporating Climate Change Impacts into Reforestation
and Revegetation Prescriptions. U.S. Department of Agriculture, Forest
Service, Northern Region.
\15\ Spies, T.A., et al. 2010. Climate change adaptation strategies
for federal forests of the Pacific Northwest, USA: ecological, policy,
and socio-economic perspectives. Landscape Ecology 25(8): 1185-1199.
In coastal systems, sea level rise is causing saltwater intrusion
into freshwater ecosystems and aquifers, habitat conversion,
infrastructure loss, and in some cases, forced relocation of coastal
communities, such as in Alaska (e.g., Native Alaska Villages of
Kivalina and Newtok) and Washington State (e.g., Hoh Tribe). The
primary adaptation approaches employed to address sea level rise,
flooding, and erosion issues include: engineered structures (rip rap,
bulkheads, tide gates), natural and nature-based approaches (natural
habitats such as wetlands or engineered natural features such as living
shorelines), and policy and regulatory techniques (tools that either
prevent infrastructure in at-risk areas, such as conservation
easements, managed retreat; or modify how activities are implemented to
reduce risk such as rolling easements, minimum development buffers,
real estate disclosures).16 Natural and nature-based
approaches are being increasingly used throughout the United States,
especially in lieu of structural approaches that are experiencing
limited and declining use, largely due to their cost, lifetime, and the
potential for negative ecological consequences.16 New and
novel approaches, including prioritizing, protecting and restoring
coastal wetlands with room to migrate inland as sea levels rise, as
well as purchasing inland/upland land to create new opportunities for
coastal habitat migration, are also important.16
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\16\ Gregg R.M., et al. 2018. Available Science Assessment Process
(ASAP): Sea Level Rise in the Pacific Northwest and Northern
California. Report to the Northwest Climate Adaptation Science Center.
EcoAdapt (Bainbridge Island, WA) and the Institute for Natural
Resources (Corvallis, OR).
Reduce the rate and extent of climate change. Decreasing greenhouse
gas emissions, planting trees, restoring vegetative cover, and
preserving open space can help to reduce climate change. If we are
looking for solutions to climate change, ending fossil fuel extraction
from public lands is a fine place to start. For every barrel of oil not
extracted from U.S. public lands, it has been estimated that global
demand decreases by half a barrel, leading to a reduction in U.S.
emissions of 280 million tons annually by 2030.\17\ This is the
essential climate change mitigation role for our public lands. Fossil
fuels left in the ground will not be entering our atmosphere as
greenhouse gases, however the carbon storage potential of biological
carbon is not so certain. For example, the carbon storage of coastal
wetlands decreases significantly as sea levels rise, drown existing
wetlands, and release carbon back into the atmosphere.\18\
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\17\ Erickson, P., and M. Lazarus. 2018. Would constraining US
fossil fuel production affect global CO2 emissions? A case
study of US leasing policy. Climatic Change 150: 29-42.
\18\ Thorne K, et al. 2018. U.S. Pacific coastal wetland resilience
and vulnerability to sea-level rise. Science Advances 4:eaao3270.
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how are adaptation efforts on public lands threatened?
Despite the urgent need for climate-informed action, the science
and practice of adaptation in the United States is at risk from recent
intentional and systematic disruptive actions. Public lands are
threatened by energy development interests, and Federal climate
programs and regulations are being defunded and dismantled.
Energy development and mining interests--oil, gas, coal, uranium,
vanadium, cobalt--have driven the reduction of boundaries of Bears Ears
and Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monuments by 85 percent and 45
percent, respectively. Bears Ears in particular is rich with cultural
significance for Native Americans, featuring over 100,000 well-
preserved cultural and archaeological sites. It is an area that is more
than tracts of land--it is a profoundly sacred place of spirituality
and subsistence. Bears Ears is also home to forests, grasslands, and
headwaters, and 18 species listed under the Endangered Species Act,
including the California condor and greenback cutthroat trout.\19\ A
recent study found that this area provides unrivaled ecological
connectivity, which is essential for species resilience as well as
biodiversity and ecological function preservation in a changing
climate.19 The Navajo people describe such intact landscapes
as Nahodishgish or ``places to be left alone.'' \20\
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\19\ Dickson, B.G., M. McClure, and C.M. Albano. 2017. A landscape-
level assessment of conservation values and potential threats in the
Bears Ears National Monument. A report to The Center for American
Progress. http://www.csp-inc.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/CSP-
BENM_Landscape_Assessment_032717.pdf.
\20\ Bears Ears Coalition. 2016. Bears Ears: A Native perspective
on America's most significant unprotected cultural landscape. http://
www.bearsearscoalition.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/Bears-Ears-
bro.sm_.pdf.
In 2009, President Obama enacted Executive Order 13514, which
mandated the evaluation and assessment of vulnerabilities that climate
change may pose to Federal agency operations and missions, as well as
the creation and implementation of agency-specific climate adaptation
plans. During that administration's tenure, many Federal agencies and
departments developed individual plans and policies, and collaborated
through interagency working groups to facilitate funding of climate
science and adaptation projects, resources, and tools to support on-
the-ground action by other governmental and non-governmental entities.
Over the last 2 years, there has been a notable shift in the support
for Federal action on climate change, largely due to a growing
politicization of science by elected and appointed officials. Federal
regulations have been dismantled, climate programs defunded, and
critical climate resources and tools removed, altered, or obfuscated,
all of which directly impacts the country's ability to prepare for,
respond to and recover from the effects of climate change. In addition
to the threatened withdrawal of the United States from the Paris
Agreement under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate
Change, numerous Executive Orders have been enacted to roll back
climate policies (e.g., reversal of the Federal Flood Risk Management
Standard, requiring Federal agencies to account for sea level rise in
building infrastructure; Executive Order 13693 on Planning for Federal
Sustainability in the Next Decade was revoked in May 2018 \21\). In
2017 alone, the current administration undertook 60 actions aimed at
removing or altering environmental regulations, laws, policies and
protections.\22\
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\21\ Executive Order 13834 Regarding Efficient Federal Operations:
https://www.whitehouse.gov/Presidential-actions/executive-order-
regarding-efficient-Federal-operations/.
\22\ Eilperin, J. and D. Cameron. 2017. ``How Trump is rolling back
Obama's legacy.'' The Washington Post, 24 March 2017.
Funding has also been stripped from most climate-related Federal
programs, which limits not only our Federal partners' capacity to
support or implement climate action, but that of by those tribal,
state, and local governments and non-governmental entities that depend
on resources and services produced at the Federal level. For example,
the Landscape Conservation Cooperatives (LCCs), housed within the
Department of the Interior, were established to provide capacity and
technical expertise to 22 regional networks of Federal, tribal, state,
and local governments, NGOs, universities, and private organizations.
Today, most LCCs are in limbo without dedicated funding and some have
been redesigned and renamed (i.e., Landscape Conservation Partnerships)
in instances where there were non-Federal partners that could provide
interim support. In addition, Federal advisory panels have been
dismantled or simply not continued, including those for the National
Climate Assessment, Interagency Land Management Adaptation Group, the
Environmental Protection Agency's Board of Scientific Counselors, and
the Department of the Interior's Advisory Committee on Climate Change
and Natural Resource Science.23,24 Finally, resources
developed by Federal agencies and their partners are now vulnerable or
have been altered or removed.25,26 While action is being
taken by many non-governmental groups to protect climate data, there is
less attention being paid to protecting the tools, reports, and
metadata that are the resources relied on by civil society.\27\ And
even where it has been ``rescued'' it become harder for users to find
when it is no longer on a Federal website.
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\23\ Eilperin, J. 2017. ``The Trump administration just disbanded a
federal advisory committee on climate change. The Washington Post, 20
August 2017.
\24\ Doyle, M. and B. Patterson. 2017. ``Climate advisory group
died quietly.'' Climatewire, 17 August 2017.
\25\ Kahn, B. 2017. ``The EPA has started to remove Obama-era
information.'' Climate Central, 2 February 2017.
\26\ Sabin Center for Climate Change Law, Silencing Science
Tracker: http://columbiaclimatelaw.com/resources/silencing-science-
tracker.
\27\ Varinsky, D. ``Scientists are banding together to fight a
looming threat from the Trump administration.'' Business Insider, 19
January 2017.
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what is needed to ensure we optimize adaptation?
When access to sound science and case studies, technical experts
and peer networks, and funding streams is restricted, decision makers
are severely limited in their ability to adequately engage in climate
adaptation. Organizations such as EcoAdapt and our partners are working
every day to prevent this stagnation. Crucial to advancing adaptation
and the climate-informed management of public lands are:
1. Access to sound science and technical experts
2. Clear climate-informed mandates, laws, and policies
3. Accessible and sustained finance streams for adaptation
initiatives
4. Increased capacity, coordination, and collaboration
Access to sound science and technical experts. Natural and cultural
resource managers are faced with various challenges on how to avoid,
minimize and/or recover from the effects of climate change. Decision
making can be complicated by uncertainty in the rate and extent of
climate change impacts over time, as well as knowledge gaps in terms of
which adaptation actions are best suited for different conditions, most
effective in reducing climate change impacts, and supported by
scientific evidence.28-31 Numerous Federal statutes call for
using the ``best available science'' to inform natural resource
management (e.g., Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management
Act, U.S. Endangered Species Act), and scientists and decision makers
consistently agree that the best available science improves the quality
of management decisions.\32\
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\28\ Bayliss, H.R., et al. 2012. Does research information meet the
needs of stakeholders? Exploring evidence selection in the global
management of invasive species. Evidence and Policy 8(1): 37-56.
\29\ Cook, C.N., M. Hockings, and R.W. Carter. 2009. Conservation
in the dark? The information used to support management decisions.
Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment 8(4): 181-18.
\30\ Eriksen, S., et al. 2011. When not every response to climate
change is a good one: Identifying principles for sustainable
adaptation. Climate and Development 3(1).
\31\ Sutherland, W.J., et al. 2004. The need for evidence-based
conservation. Trends in Ecology & Evolution 19(6):305-308.
\32\ Sullivan, P.J., et al. Defining and Implementing Best
Available Science for Fisheries and Environmental Science, Policy, and
Management. Marine Sciences Faculty Scholarship. Paper 30.
Making climate-informed decisions requires the integration of
science, including evidence of effectiveness. The presence of and
access to high-quality research, including data collection, analysis,
and synthesis, supports optimal decision-making conditions for managers
and planners, particularly in light of climate change. Identifying what
approaches are being implemented and to what degree of success expands
the list of options for managers seeking to address climate change
impacts. Part of this critical need for research is understanding and
learning from past and ongoing efforts. Since 2009, EcoAdapt has
engaged in a sustained research initiative--the State of Adaptation
Program--to identify, evaluate, and assess climate adaptation
activities in planning and underway. These projects have included
identification and synthesis of best available science on historic,
observed, and projected future climatic changes and impacts, extensive
reviews of Federal, tribal, state, and local climate change planning
documents, over 4,000 interviews with practitioners in order to
identify trends and barriers to climate adaptation action, and over 400
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case studies.
Knowledge transfer and sharing of lessons learned among managers is
fundamental to ensuring effective, successful adaptation outcomes.
Federal (Climate Resilience Toolkit \33\) and non-governmental
(EcoAdapt, Climate Adaptation Knowledge Exchange \34\) knowledge
brokers play central roles in gathering, synthesizing, and
contextualizing science into digestible and actionable information
sources. Action must be taken to preserve what credible Federal
resources are still available and support non-Federal adaptation
science providers and brokers. Over the past 2 years, as Federal
websites were stripped of mentions of climate change and access to
adaptation guidance and examples were moved, key boundary organizations
stepped up to fill these gaps. To protect access to sound science,
EcoAdapt implemented a multi-phased plan to ensure the public could
continue to rely on Federal resources through the CAKE database. While
other groups focused on basic climate data rescue, we prioritized
adaptation resources including reports, guidance, tools, and records of
projects and case studies.
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\33\ Climate Resilience Toolkit: https://toolkit.climate.gov/.
\34\ Climate Adaptation Knowledge Exchange: http://www.CAKEx.org.
Clear climate-informed mandates, laws, and policies. Through the
State of Adaptation Program interviews, we have found that one of the
leading motivations of adaptation action on public lands is clear
agency mandates, laws and policies. To move agencies and departments
beyond planning into needed implementation projects on public lands,
bringing back agency mandates to intentionally address and incorporate
climate change in all their management decisions is critical. These
mandates and policies should require agencies to work across
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jurisdictions to increase the likelihood of success.
Accessible and sustained finance streams for adaptation
initiatives. One of the biggest barriers to adaptation action is a lack
of funding,\35\ inability to apply funding to adaptation efforts, or a
lack of access to sustained funding. Adaptation is a multi-phased
process that includes scientific assessments, planning, implementation,
and monitoring and evaluation. Funding directed to just one of these
phases will not deliver the results needed to comprehensively address
climate change. Therefore, it is imperative that the Federal Government
increase its capacity to provide sustained funding to all stages of the
adaptation process, particularly to implementation where upfront costs
tend to be higher. Emphasis must also focus on increasing the capacity
of boundary organizations, such as non-governmental partners, to
execute climate adaptation work. These organizations are sources of
highly specialized and locally relevant expertise, and execute on-the-
ground work from technical decision support to facilitating community
discourse through workshops. Additional funding sources include
foundations and local and state governments. However, many of these
initiatives have resulted in piecemeal, fragmented, and disparate
approaches, as well as a lack of movement beyond assessment and
planning into implementation and evaluation. Federal finance plays a
key role in funding all phases of the climate adaptation process. In
fact Federal funding that is used to support projects that are not
inherently taking climate change into account is likely to be money
misspent--unable to create the benefits it was intended to achieve when
the effects of climate change erode the target efforts.
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\35\ Archie, K.M., et al. 2012. Climate change and western public
lands: a survey of U.S. federal land managers on the status of
adaptation efforts. Ecology and Society 17(4).
Increased capacity, coordination, and collaboration. One the
greatest resources we have to address climate change is the collective
capacity of scientists and managers in our Federal, tribal, and state
agencies and non-governmental institutions. The knowledge, experience,
and ingenuity brought by our Federal partners cannot be undervalued as
a key part of the solution to climate change. To capitalize on this
asset, we need increased capacity, coordination, and collaboration
among and between Federal agencies and their non-Federal partners,
including tribal nations, non-profits, small businesses, frontline
communities, and academic institutions.
concluding thoughts
The problems presented by climate change are vast and the solutions
are innumerable and already overdue. With a challenge as urgent and
pervasive as climate change, any delay in action is harmful. We have
been underachieving for decades. Further prevention of progress will
result in backsliding with irreversible and in some cases deadly
consequences. What we need is someone to step forward. As a co-equal
branch of government, this Congress has the ability to right the ship
and advance climate action like never before--at a rate appropriate for
the scale and speed of this problem. Key items for prioritization
include:
Continued protection and restoration of existing public
lands and, where possible, expansion of these areas to
maintain ecological functions, ecosystem services, and
overall resilience. These efforts should include
prioritizing areas that may serve as refugia--places that
are likely to maintain more stable conditions over time--
for plant, fish, and wildlife species, and eliminating
energy development.
Increased investments in science- and evidence-based
approaches to climate adaptation while allowing for
flexibility to identify, develop, and test promising, novel
approaches. This includes not just funding for modeling and
data collection, but also increased funding for
implementation of activities with requirements for the
evaluation of effectiveness, and capturing and sharing
lessons learned.
Increased coordination and collaboration between Federal
entities and non-Federal partners (including international
partners) to advance climate adaptation objectives. For
example, the majority of Federal dollars goes toward fire
suppression rather than prevention activities. Getting fire
back onto the landscape (both natural and prescribed burns)
to support ecological functions is critical, especially as
a means to reduce wildfire risk. This includes supporting
tribal cultural burning practices across the landscape.
Discontinue (and certainly do not expand) the extraction
of fossil fuels from Federal lands for use in energy
generation. Not only does the practice of fuel extraction
cause environmental degradation that reduces resilience,
but the burning of those fuels literally adds insult to
injury causing the changes that require even greater
resilience. Simply put, we need to stop increasing the rate
and extent of climate change in order to protect our public
lands and the services they provide to us.
Congress' power to appropriate funds can be wielded as one of the
most effective tools to ensure the protection of public lands and the
prioritization of climate adaptation overall. Appropriations should be
viewed through a climate lens to ensure that the agencies, departments,
and research programs most qualified and poised to meet the climate
challenge are adequately funded, and that any investments of tax payer
dollars are not mis-spent on efforts that are likely to be undermined
by the effects of climate change. We need simultaneous action at the
scale required to solve the problem on climate change mitigation and
adaptation. Approaches like the Green New Deal present the types of
opportunities we need to seize to take action on mitigation, while
working to integrate investments in climate adaptation across all
agencies to address the effects of climate change we are and will
experience due to the past emissions we did not curb.
I invite the current Congress to have the fortitude your
predecessors have lacked. The time to take meaningful action on climate
change to protect not only our public lands but our citizens and our
neighbors around the globe is upon us. It is your job as elected
officials to recognize the scope of this crisis and make the changes
that are needed. Be brave. Be bold. Take action today for a better
tomorrow.
______
Questions Submitted for the Record by Rep. Haaland to Dr. Lara Hansen,
Executive Director and Chief Scientist, EcoAdapt
Question 1. Both your and Dr. Gonzalez's work and testimony
suggests the need to protect more places from the dangers of climate
change.
1a. As policy makers, are there any places that we should
prioritize for protection?
Answer. Climate change is already affecting natural and cultural
resources and the human communities that depend on them, and is
projected to continue for centuries to come. Impacts include loss of
habitats and connectivity, shifts in animal and plant species
distribution and abundance, alteration of natural communities, and
significant changes in water availability and supply. Places to
prioritize for protection in terrestrial systems include areas of
climate refugia, wildlife corridors, enduring features, and headwater
and groundwater sources. In particular, it is essential that we
implement a portfolio of prioritization approaches to better cope with
climate-related uncertainty. Protecting these places will help maintain
habitat and species diversity, as well as the services they provide to
people, over the long term.
Climate refugia, or areas relatively buffered from contemporary
climate change over time, provide locations that species can retreat
to, persist in, and potentially expand from under changing climate
conditions.\1\ Protecting areas of climate refugia can include
identifying places that have remained relatively stable from historic
to current conditions or places that are projected to remain stable
with future climate change. For example, identifying places that have
effectively maintained soil moisture levels over the last 100 years,
even in the face of episodic droughts, or identifying places that are
likely to continue to maintain adequate soil moisture levels even under
hot and dry future climate conditions. Protecting wildlife corridors
(both current and potential future routes) as well as habitat linkage
areas (i.e. those places that connect intact or core habitats to one
another) allows species to move across the landscape in response to
changing conditions, helping to facilitate gene flow and decrease
extinction risk. This could also include planning along latitudinal and
elevational gradients. Enduring geophysical features (e.g., topography,
soils, geology) seem to be the factors that help create species
diversity in the first place.\2\ Protecting areas with a diversity of
geophysical features provides species and communities with the space to
move and reorganize in response to climate change. Last, given the
inherent uncertainty associated with precipitation projections (amount,
timing, type), it is critical to prioritize the protection of our
headwater and groundwater sources as it will help minimize the impacts
of other non-climate stressors. Because the locations of many
groundwater sources are currently unknown, an important first step will
be providing the resources necessary to find and map these locations.
It is also important to protect the area around these sites such that
they are buffered and connected to the greater landscape.
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\1\ Morelli TL, et al. 2017. Climate change refugia and habitat
connectivity promote species persistence. Climate Change Responses
4(8).
\2\ Lawler JJ, et al. 2015. The theory behind, and the challenges
of, conserving nature's stage in a time of rapid change. Conservation
Biology 29(3): 618-629.
1b. How might we work with the Federal land management agencies to
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identify and prioritize the protection of these places?
Answer. It is important to note that effective natural resources
management includes a balance between ``hands off'' preservation of
some natural areas and the conservation of natural areas for continued
and sustainable use. While preservation efforts may be appropriate in
protecting specific sites to eliminate all human activity, the vast
majority of conservation efforts require some active management of
natural lands to ensure the continued availability and use of ecosystem
services, such as food, timber, water supply, and cultural heritage.
This is particularly true for climate adaptation practices wherein
reducing vulnerability to both climate and non-climate stresses (e.g.,
pollution, water and oil withdrawals) is key. Congress has several
tools at its disposal to support natural resources management in a
changing climate--legislation, appropriations, oversight, and public
hearings.
Legislation. Congress can support climate-informed action by
passing climate change legislation, creating amendments to existing
legislation, integrating climate change into National Environmental
Policy Act (NEPA) processes, and designating public lands that support
climate change mitigation and adaptation goals. For example, Congress
could create an amendment to the Coastal Zone Management Act, calling
for the Coastal and Estuarine Land Conservation Program to not only
protect coastal areas with ``significant conservation, recreation,
ecological, historical, or aesthetic values'' (16 U.S.C. Sec. 1456-1),
but also to explicitly protect areas of climate adaptation significance
(e.g., refugia, corridors). Congress should encourage all NEPA-related
environmental analyses to consider both the effects of climate change
on projects and the effects of projects on climate change (e.g., how a
proposed project may exacerbate greenhouse gas emissions). A tool like
the Climate Change Adaptation Certification \3\ could be employed. In
addition, Congress may designate public lands and review designations
made by Executive Order to ensure that public lands maintain ecological
functions and services in a changing climate. For example, Congress can
create national monuments on public lands (e.g., Tule Springs Fossil
Beds in Nevada) or review and reverse national monument decisions
(e.g., Mount Olympus National Monument was re-designated as Olympic
National Park in 1938 \4\). Congress can establish other public lands--
national parks, national conservation areas, wilderness areas--to
support climate mitigation and adaptation efforts. These decisions may
be made in consultation with Federal land management agencies to ensure
protection of sites that include climate refugia, wildlife corridors,
enduring features, and headwater and groundwater sources.
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\3\ Justus Nordgren, S. and L.J.Hansen. 2018. Climate Change
Adaptation Certification. EcoAdapt. https://www.cakex.org/adaptation-
certification.
\4\ National Park Service. 2018. Monuments List. National Park
Service Archaeology Program, https://www.nps.gov/archeology/sites/
antiquities/MonumentsList.htm.
Appropriations. Congressional appropriations should be viewed
through a climate lens to ensure that the agencies, departments, and
research programs most qualified and poised to meet the challenges of
climate change are adequately funded. Sufficient budgets and staffing
of Federal agencies are needed to facilitate institutional capacity for
climate action. Adequate funds also need to be available to support on-
the-ground climate action by other governmental and non-governmental
entities. Congress can also eliminate riders that are contrary to
climate mitigation and adaptation and conservation goals (e.g.,
blocking consideration of the economic costs of carbon pollution,
repealing clean water rules). Congressional appropriations can be used
to fund the scientific research, data collection, mapping, modeling,
and staff time necessary to identify climate refugia, wildlife
corridors and linkage areas, enduring features, and headwater and
groundwater sources. Appropriations also allow Federal land managers to
manage the best they can; for example, while the majority of Federal
dollars goes toward fire suppression rather than prevention activities,
most land managers recommend getting fire back onto the landscape
through both natural and prescribed burns to better support ecological
functions and reduce wildfire risk.\5\
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\5\ Gregg RM, et al. 2016. Available Science Assessment Project:
Prescribed Fire and Climate Change in Northwest National Forests.
Report to the Department of the Interior's Northwest Climate Science
Center.
Oversight. Congress can use its oversight powers to review,
monitor, and otherwise supervise Federal agencies, programs, and
activities to ensure that climate change mitigation and adaptation are
adequately integrated. For example, Congress can hold polluters
accountable for carbon emissions and other sources of pollution.
Reducing these non-climate stresses, many of which can exacerbate the
effects of climate change (e.g., temperature affects the toxicity of
various chemicals \6\), increases overall resilience.
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\6\ Gregg RM, et al. 2011. The State of Marine and Coastal
Adaptation in North America: A Synthesis of Emerging Ideas. EcoAdapt,
Bainbridge Island, WA.
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Public Hearings. Congress can give a voice to the land managers and
everyday Americans experiencing climate change on the ground. In
addition to inviting scientists to present their findings, we would
encourage you to amplify the voices of the managers of these public
lands who are making the everyday decisions in light of climate change
as well as the administrative restrictions they are under. Part of
EcoAdapt's role as climate adaptation facilitators is to identify the
ways in which managers can make modifications to current practices and
co-produce (with the relevant stakeholder communities) new, innovative
strategies to address the climate challenge. No one is more passionate
about protecting public lands than the people who work on them every
day. Giving them the space to share their challenges, needs, and
successes will be critical to informing Federal action.
Question 2. Dr. Hansen, when you say ``protecting adequate and
appropriate space for ecosystems to function under changing
conditions,'' what kind of actions would that include?
Answer.
This means protecting ample space for ecosystem services
such as hydrological function under changing precipitation
patterns. For example, what are the new requirements the
recharge of groundwater or flow of surface water.
This means protecting locations that appear to be climate
refugia, meaning those locations that are changing less
quickly and may afford natural systems the ability to
respond on their own.
This means supporting connectivity across landscapes so
species (animal and plant) can move in response to changing
climatic conditions. This includes thinking about
latitudinal and elevational gradients.
This means keeping systems as intact as possible so
natural diversity can allow for the greatest number of
potential response avenues.
This means designing restoration efforts for not only
current and future conditions, not reach for a past that
cannot exist again given the elevated levels of carbon
dioxide in our atmosphere.
Question 3. Dr. Hansen, in your testimony you mentioned that we
need to provide our agencies with clear, informed mandates to begin
preparing for climate change.
3a. Has this Administration provided these?
Answer. In short, no. The Administration has intentionally and
systematically worked to eliminate or repeal climate-informed mandates,
policies, and regulations. Furthermore, Federal climate programs have
been defunded or dismantled, and scientific advisory groups dedicated
to advising the Federal Government on best approaches to prepare for
and respond to climate change have been disbanded.\7\
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\7\ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/2017/
08/20/the-trump-administration-just-disbanded-a-federal-advisory-
committee-on-climate-change/?utm_term=.5d89 df6ed69d.
This Administration has taken more than 70 actions aimed at
removing or altering environmental and climate mandates, regulations,
and policies.\8\ From international actions, such as announcing the
withdrawal from the Paris Climate Accord, to revoking an Obama-era
Executive Order setting Federal Flood Risk Management Standards,
climate mandates put in place by previous administrations are under
attack. Under the explanation of streamlining the approval process for
building infrastructure, the current administration signed an Executive
Order eliminating Obama-era planning step to make roads, bridges and
buildings more resilient to climate and flood dangers. The current
administration has also dissolved the Federal advisory panel for the
National Climate Assessment, a group that helps policy makers and
private-sector officials incorporate the government's climate analysis
into long-term planning. In addition, the EPA and Department of the
Interior have followed suit, with the EPA dismissing dozens of
scientists from their Board of Scientific Counselors and Interior is
not renewing the charters of numerous scientific advisory panels.
Beyond these actions, the agencies are failing to enforce existing
regulations and limiting enforcement mechanisms by others.
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\8\ https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/politics/trump-rolling-
back-obama-rules/?utm_term =.0aec397d6676.
The loss of adaptation resources (and government services in
general) is further exacerbated by recent changes in funding streams
through changing tax law. Reduced Federal tax revenue will result in
further cuts to Federal programs, and changes in state tax deductions
will likely erode local tax revenue streams. With state and local
programs being touted as the backstop to lost Federal action this may
undermine that potential. Should charitable contribution tax deductions
be changed that would also undermine NGO adaptation activities, leaving
American society with little access to information or support as it
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faces the perils of climate change.
3b. What type of mandates might we give to help the Government
begin to address the impacts of climate change?
Answer. Through EcoAdapt's State of Adaptation Program, we have
found that the leading motivations for adaptation action on public
lands is clear agency mandates, laws, and policies.
We recommend mandates focus on:
1. Changing goal of public land management from short-term, multi-
use industry concerns to a focus on the maintenance of the
long-term health of our public lands for ecosystem services
(which themselves have strong fiscal value) and public
health. This shift in focus will enable agencies to embrace
and prioritize planning for long-term uses including
insurance against the effects of climate change, over
short-term uses that often exacerbate climate change. We
should definitely ensure that our public lands are not
being used to make climate change worse by increase
greenhouse gas emissions either through fossil fuel
extraction or unmitigated use.
2. Focus on science, research, and technical experts
Prioritization of science and research is crucial
because most agencies current mandates direct them to use the
best available science. This science needs to reflect current
and up to date understanding of current and future climate
conditions and the implications of those conditions.
Technical experts are crucial to moving beyond
research and planning into implementation. Without specific and
clear direction from technical experts, Federal mandates will
not translate into effective on-the-ground actions.
3. Require agencies to capture, share, and translate climate
adaptation knowledge
Capture and Share: Most crucial to on-the-ground
adaptation success are lessons learned from practitioners
around the field. Given the scope of the lands managed by
Federal agencies, these managers play a key role in building
and advancing the field of adaptation.
Translation and synthesis: Managers often cite
relevance, scale, and context as a barrier to the usability of
climate science. Translation, or knowledge brokers, of climate
science and adaptation research such as the Climate Adaptation
Knowledge Exchange (CAKE), are vital to ensure on the ground
managers have access to digestable and actionable information.
4. Require all phases of the adaptation process (assessment,
planning, implementation, monitoring and evaluation) as
well as thorough reporting on progress (including
successes, failures, and modified approaches or lessons
learned).
Include thorough reporting/oversight processes on
progress including successes and failures, and modified
approaches.
Reported progress should be tied to previous
planning phase (e.g. planning should be tied to reducing
vulnerability identified in assessment phase).
Mandate needs to identify accountability for
progress, as well as highlight champions and leadership.
Finally, mandates need to be coupled with climate adaptation
capacity at the agency and external partner level, appropriations and
funding, and accountability and oversight. This means that Federal
staff need appropriate training in climate change adaptation, which is
often required through professional continuing education opportunities
as much of the Federal work force has no formal training in this area
of science and management practice. This should be supported through
the National Conservation Training Center, Sea Grant, a national
adaptation extension service, and other venues such as the National
Adaptation Forum. Congress must ensure that there is sufficient funding
to not only support training of Federal staff, but the funding for
sufficient staff and the inclusion of funds to design, implement,
monitor and share adaptation actions.
Question 4. Dr. Hansen, you suggest in your testimony that Federal
funding for projects that don't account for climate change is often
money misspent.
4a. Can you please elaborate on this claim?
Answer. When climate change is not recognized, and a project (or
policy) is design or implemented without explicitly considering the
implications of climate change, the project (or policy) is vulnerable
to the effects of climate change. When those vulnerabilities become
realities the climate uninformed project (or policy) will no longer be
effective. It will then need to be repaired, replaced, removed or
repeated elsewhere. This means that the initial projected or policy was
taxpayer dollars not delivering the outcome they paid for.
Additionally, citizens, businesses, communities and ecosystems may
incur harm from the project (or policy) that did not deliver on its
intended and advertised outcome.
There are at least two major categories in by which this can
happen.
1. Funds (or Federal employee effort) are expended in a manner that
assumes conditions today are the same as they were in the
past and will not change in the future. As a result, the
work will not garner the desired effects given the reality
that climate change will mean that today is different from
yesterday and tomorrow will be different than today. For
example, consider a coastal infrastructure investment such
as a road, an estuary restoration project, or a coastal
sewage treatment plant that are designed without taking sea
level rise projections (relevant to the project lifetime)
into account. You could also consider building standards or
land use management in increasingly fire prone regions that
does not take into account the increasing risk therefore
putting new structures, communities and associated
ecosystems at risk. You could also consider changing
frequencies of flood events, wherein older flood projection
maps continue to be used to make land use decisions or
allow for the use of FEMA funds to rebuild in harm's way--
again putting people, property, business and government
function at risk.
Uninformed decisions such as all of these (and many more) may
result in either the need to spend additional funds to
redesign the project when the vulnerability becomes an
``event'' that renders the project ineffective. For
example, the restoration project fails because the site is
inundated or the species used for the project has moved out
of the region as temperatures change. Similarly, if a road
is inundated it may require a sea wall, drains or pumps; or
it may require that the road is moved to an entirely new
location. In all cases there is an additional expenditure
of funds to provide the same service as the initial outlay
before the lifetime of the project should have ended.
2. Funds are not spent to address the challenges of climate change
leaving existing efforts vulnerable to the impacts of
climate change. Often there are existing investments or
resources that need new actions to protect them. This can
include creating living shorelines to protected coastal
infrastructure, funding the application of prescribed fire
to protect our forestlands, upgrading culverts and bridges
to avoid flood and erosion damage, funding enforcement to
protect natural habitats and species from illegal poaching
and destruction.
4b. How do we best ensure we're getting a fair return on taxpayer
funded infrastructure projects?
Answer. First of all, it is not just infrastructure projects that
may be vulnerable to these issues. The simplest path to this is to both
build the capacity of Federal agency staff and Congress about climate
science and adaptation, and to create explicit review mechanisms that
require evaluation of the implications of climate change on any Federal
expenditure, project or other action. Using a tool such as the Climate
Change Adaptation Certification,\9\ provides a structure for how to do
this, along with direction to readily available climate science to use
in the evaluation, and a structure around how to make decisions based
on what this analysis indicates. This is very similar to how current
analyses are done to the financial or environmental impact of a project
(or policy).
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\9\ Justus Nordgren, S. and L.J. Hansen. 2018. Climate Change
Adaptation Certification. EcoAdapt. Bainbridge Island, WA.
www.CAKEx.org/Adaptation-Certification.
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______
Ms. Haaland. Thank you, Dr. Hansen.
The Chair now recognizes Mr. Hans Cole.
STATEMENT OF HANS COLE, DIRECTOR OF ENVIRONMENTAL CAMPAIGNS AND
ADVOCACY, PATAGONIA, INC., VENTURA, CALIFORNIA
Mr. Cole. Chairman Haaland, Ranking Member Young, thank you
for the opportunity to testify today. My name is Hans Cole, and
I am the Director of Campaigns and Advocacy for Patagonia.
At Patagonia, we are in business to save the home planet.
On behalf of our 3,000 employees and their families and
communities across America and around the world, I commend the
Committee for tackling this issue, and I strongly urge you to
take bold action to address our planet's climate crisis before
it is too late.
The science reflects what we are seeing with our own eyes,
and the voices of the American people and responsible
businesses on the topic are clear. If we fail to change course,
global temperatures will continue to rise and environmental
emergencies, wildfires, deadly heat waves, hurricanes,
flooding, and growing food shortages will grow worse.
At Patagonia, we believe that clean, renewable energy,
regenerative organic farming, and public land and water
protection should play critical roles in addressing the climate
crisis. My testimony today will focus on our public lands.
America's public lands are one of our greatest collective
assets, but they are also the source of substantial greenhouse
gas emissions. Almost a quarter of all greenhouse gas emissions
in the United States come from fossil fuels extracted from
public lands or offshore waters. This will get much worse, as
the Trump administration continues its assault on land and
water protections, despite outcries from outdoor enthusiasts
and companies of all political stripes who, together, represent
a nearly $900 billion industry.
We oppose the Administration's proposed offshore leasing
and drilling. It would make more than 90 percent of U.S. waters
available to oil and gas companies.
We oppose an attack on Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife
Refuge that would open one of our planet's truly wild places
for drilling.
And we oppose the slashing size of Utah's Bears Ears and
Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monuments, and any reduction
in size of other monuments, as well.
The Administration's actions not only rob native people and
all Americans of their natural and cultural heritage, threaten
communities that depend on the outdoor economy, poison our
water and air, and damage vulnerable species, they also make
the climate crisis worse.
Opening up public lands to more extraction will increase
emissions and destroy ecosystems that help mitigate climate
change by storing carbon. Instead, Congress should impose a
moratorium on oil and gas drilling in Federal waters, and bar
drilling in Alaska's remaining wild places.
We urge you to restore Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-
Escalante National Monuments, and support measures like
Representative Haaland, yours, and Senator Udall's bill to make
it clear that no president has the authority to undermine the
protection of America's national monuments.
Congress should also permanently re-authorize and fully
fund the Land and Water Conservation Fund, which has used a
small percentage of revenues from existing offshore drilling
leases to protect 5 million acres of public parks, wildlife
habitats, and recreation areas.
Instead of further slicing up our landscapes and waterways,
we should build wildlife overpasses and underpasses, invest in
communities eager to remove unsafe and damaging dams, and
strengthen large-scale wildlife corridors for migratory
species. These are all bipartisan solutions that address
climate issues and appeal to outdoor enthusiasts and businesses
in every single state.
Patagonia supports proposals to transition to 100 percent
clean, renewable energy by 2050. We need to focus on the
cleanest available technology, including wind, solar, and
geothermal, and not rely on the false promise of outdated
technologies like hydro-electric dams and nuclear power that
have catastrophic consequences for our public lands and waters
by producing toxic waste and driving species to extinction.
If Congress takes bold action to address this crisis, it
will challenge the private sector to step up, as well, and
Patagonia will continue to do our part. We are reinvesting $10
million from the 2017 irresponsible corporate tax cuts to
groups working to solve the causes of the climate crisis. And
Patagonia is committed to becoming carbon neutral across our
entire business, including across our supply chain, by 2025.
Please make 2019 the year that the United States finally
takes decisive action to fight the climate crisis. Please
reclaim our public lands and waters from the polluters and give
them back to the people.
Thank you, and I look forward to any questions you may have
for me.
[The prepared statement of Mr. Cole follows:]
Prepared Statement of Hans Cole, Director of Environmental Campaigns &
Advocacy, Patagonia, Inc
Chairman Haaland, Ranking Member Young. Thank you for the
opportunity to testify today. My name is Hans Cole, and I am director
of Campaigns and Advocacy for Patagonia. At Patagonia, we are in
business to save our home planet. On behalf of our 3,000 employees, and
their families and communities across America and around the world, I
commend the Committee for tackling this issue, and I strongly urge you
to take bold action to address our planet's climate crisis head-on
before it is too late.
The science reflects what we see with our own eyes, and the voices
of the American people and responsible businesses on the topic are
clear. If we fail to change course, global temperatures will continue
to rise and environmental emergencies--massive wildfires, deadly heat
waves, disastrous hurricanes, major flooding, growing food shortages--
will grow worse.
The U.S. Government's 2018 National Climate Assessment noted that
ecological catastrophe will lead to an economic catastrophe, wiping out
up to 10 percent of the American economy by 2100. That is not good for
business, but it's even worse for our employees, our customers and your
constituents who could see wages drop and unemployment rise.
We believe that clean renewable energy, regenerative organic
farming, and purposeful public lands protection should play critical
roles in addressing the climate crisis. Consistent with this
Committee's interest in public lands, my testimony today will focus on
purposeful protection of these important places and the need to
transition to a more sustainable future.
America's public lands are one of our greatest collective assets
but they are also the source of substantial greenhouse gas emissions.
According to the U.S. Geological Survey, almost a quarter of all
greenhouse gas emissions in the United States come from fossil fuels
extracted from public lands or offshore waters. Oil, gas, and mining
corporations are damaging our public lands and waters and worsening the
climate crisis. This will get much worse as the Trump administration
continues an assault on land and water protections, despite outcries
from outdoor enthusiasts and companies of all political stripes who
together represent a nearly $900 billion industry. We oppose:
The Administration's proposed offshore leasing and
drilling that would make more than 90 percent of U.S.
waters available to oil and gas companies, including the
entire Atlantic and Pacific coasts, the entire Gulf of
Mexico, and most of Alaska's available coastal waters.
An attack on Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge that
would open one of our planet's last truly wild places to
drilling and accelerate the destruction of the Western
Arctic.
Slashing the size of Utah's Bears Ears and Grand
Staircase-Escalante National Monuments, in violation of the
Antiquities Act.
The Administration's actions not only rob Native people and all
Americans of their natural and cultural heritage, threaten communities
that depend on the outdoor industry for economic survival, poison our
water and air, and wreak untold damage on vulnerable species--they also
exacerbate the climate crisis. Opening up public lands to more
extraction will increase emissions and destroy ecosystems that help
mitigate climate change by storing carbon.
Instead, Congress should impose a moratorium on oil and gas
drilling in Federal waters and bar drilling in Alaska's remaining wild
places. We urge you to restore Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante
National Monuments, and support measures like Senator Udall and
Representative Haaland's bill to make it clear that the President has
no authority to undermine the protection of America's National
Monuments.
Congress should also permanently reauthorize and fully fund the
Land and Water Conservation Fund, which has used a small percentage of
revenues from existing offshore drilling leases to protect 5 million
acres of public parks, wildlife habitats, and recreation areas across
the country. Instead of further slicing up our important landscapes and
waterways, we should build wildlife overpasses and underpasses, invest
in communities eager to remove unsafe and damaging dams and diversions,
and strengthen large-scale wildlife corridors for migratory species.
These are all bipartisan solutions that address climate issues and
appeal to the outdoor enthusiasts in every single state, as well as the
small and big businesses that rely on tourism and protected natural
resources for their livelihood.
Along with protecting our public lands as one of our greatest
resources to combat climate change, we must also transition our economy
to rely on clean, renewable energy. Congress should stop spending
taxpayer dollars subsidizing large oil and gas companies and approving
destructive projects like the Keystone XL and Dakota Access pipelines,
and reverse the drive to loosen restrictions on coal-fired power
plants, inefficient cars and trucks, and polluters of all kinds.
Patagonia supports proposals to transition to 100 percent clean,
renewable energy by 2050. We need to invest in transformative research
and green infrastructure like a smart electric grid. Congress should
provide incentives to encourage American consumers and businesses to
install solar panels, build wind turbines, buy electric vehicles, and
retrofit buildings to make them more energy efficient.
The traditional ``all-of-the-above'' approach has unfortunately
relied on the false promise of outdated technologies like nuclear
plants and hydroelectric dams that have catastrophic consequences for
our environment by producing toxic waste and driving species to
extinction. The only viable path for the planet's survival is to
embrace wind, solar, geothermal, and other truly clean and renewable
sources of energy.
This transition toward a less-polluting economy must account for
how American's food is grown and distributed. Agriculture is a
significant part of the American economy, contributing billions to GDP,
and is also a source of substantial greenhouse gas emissions, emitting
about 650 million metric tons of CO2 equivalent annually.
But how we grow our food also holds great promise in combatting climate
change. At Patagonia we have helped develop a new standard--the
Regenerative Organic Certification--that builds on current organic
practices to improve soil health. Regenerative organic farming has the
potential to remove carbon from the atmosphere, storing it in the soil.
Studies indicate that if we moved from current industrial farming to
regenerative organic practices we could sequester enough carbon to
slow, if not completely halt, the growing amount of CO2 in
our atmosphere. And experts agree we could feed our growing population
using regenerative organic farming.
If Congress takes bold action in all these areas--protecting public
lands and waters and promoting a change to clean, renewable energy
along with encouraging regenerative organic agriculture--it will
challenge the private sector to step up as well. Patagonia will
continue to do our part.
We are re-investing $10 million we received from the 2017
irresponsible corporate tax cuts by donating to groups that are
fighting to protect our air, land, and water to save our planet.
Patagonia is committed to becoming carbon neutral across our entire
business--including across our supply chain--by 2025. That means we
will reduce, capture or otherwise mitigate all of the carbon emissions
we create, including the emissions from the factories that make our
textiles and finished clothing. We will use only renewable or recycled
materials in our products, and by 2020 we will use only renewable
electricity in our stores and offices. We are similarly piloting
products made and built compliant with the new Regenerative Organic
Certification to show the world that products can be built using these
practices.
Patagonia will continue to encourage our community and customers to
participate in the democratic process. As long as polluters wield
power, Patagonia will speak out and fight back. We will proudly and
transparently support candidates and causes we believe in.
Please make 2019 the year that the United States finally takes
decisive action to fight the climate crisis. Please reclaim our public
lands and water from the polluters and give them back to the people.
Thank you for the opportunity to testify here today. I look forward
to any questions you may have for me.
______
Questions Submitted for the Record by Rep. Haaland to Hans Cole,
Director of Environmental Campaigns and Advocacy, Patagonia, Inc.
Question 1. Mr. Cole, some conservatives, especially those from the
West, often cast our public lands as a burden. They claim that public
lands hurt economies and ruin development potential. Do you at
Patagonia think that public lands harm communities?
Answer. At Patagonia, we do not think of public lands as a burden,
and in fact just the opposite: as a business that relies on protected
public lands for our very existence, we know that public lands,
particularly protected public lands, contribute immensely to the health
and economic vitality of local communities. Looking first at the data,
Headwaters Economics, an independent, non-partisan research firm, has
shown that from the early 1970s to the early 2010s, ``. . . rural
counties in the West with more federal lands or protected federal lands
[perform] better on average than their peers with less federal lands.''
This was shown to be true for four key economic measures: population,
employment, personal income, and to a smaller extent, per capita income
growth. Public lands also bring value across numerous different areas:
from the ecosystem services of clean water and air (for example,
National Forests provide as much as 33 percent of our water in the
West), to the more community-based values of healthy opportunities for
kids and families, to the recreation sector and economy that Patagonia
is a part of. This sector, which brings economic opportunity for many
``gateway'' communities that sit at the doorstep of our public lands,
now provides $887 billion in annual consumer spending and 7.6 million
jobs (as compared with about 180,000 jobs from oil and gas extraction).
National parks, national wildlife refuges, national monuments and other
public lands and waters account for $45 billion in economic output and
about 396,000 jobs nationwide--many of which are in communities with
close proximity to public lands.
It's equally clear when you ask the public: a clear majority of
people from across the political spectrum love our protected public
lands and recognize the importance of the outdoor economy they support.
For example, in the 2019 Colorado College ``Conservation in the West''
poll, results indicate that ``. . . there is almost no partisan
distinction in perceptions of outdoor recreation's importance to the
economic future of the West.'' Whether it was Republicans, Independents
or Democrats responding, over 85 percent indicated that outdoor
recreation is important to their state's economic future.
Finally, coming out of the hearing on February 13, it's critical to
note that our public lands are an important and often overlooked
component of community-level efforts to address climate change.
Protected public lands (where forests, wetlands, grasslands and other
ecosystems are intact) have increased carbon storage capacity that will
be needed to reduce greenhouse gases in the long term, and in the short
term, provide the ecosystem services and resilience that communities
will require as precipitation patterns and temperatures change, and as
we face increasing fires, floods and other challenges. Intact and
protected public lands provide a refuge for biodiversity and
connectivity for migrating species that will need to move and adapt in
response to a changing climate. And, with care given to smart and
ecologically sensitive citing, we can even consider renewable energy
development opportunities on our public lands. In summary, protected
public lands are one of our greatest assets in the fight to protect our
communities and ecosystems in the face of climate change.
Question 2. Mr. Cole, this Administration has prioritized
extraction on our public lands over other uses, exposing us to the
dangers of climate change and to the local impacts associated with
methane leakage and groundwater depletion and contamination. This
prioritization includes the alteration of our national monuments,
seemingly for the benefit of fossil fuel interests.
2a. Why is it important that we protect our public lands from
unbridled extraction and depletion?
2b. What benefits do national monuments provide that supersede the
benefits of short-term and short-sighted extraction?
Answer. Public lands provide a diverse array of values to local
communities, and they are critical to maintaining a life-sustaining
climate and biosphere on a macro level. However, when we prioritize
using these lands for resource extraction--particularly without any
sense of balance or attention to sensitive ecosystems--we quickly lose
access to many of the values that protected public lands offer.
Unbridled resource extraction creates serious and long-lasting impacts
(for example: pollution, disturbance, aesthetic impacts, barriers such
as dams and fences, and carbon emissions), that permanently damage
natural ecosystems, threaten biodiversity, exacerbate climate change,
and exclude, often permanently, other more sustainable activities.
While sometimes touted as part of a ``multi-use'' agenda on our public
lands, the truth is that unwise resource extraction can turn our public
lands into a single-use landscape, one where corporate interests are
favored over those of citizens who rely on the place to support a more
diverse, sustainable economy, or to recreate and spend time with family
and community. Intensive resource extraction can also damage cultural
resources and uses of the land important to native communities, who in
many cases live closest to these landscapes and have a connection with
them that stretches back hundreds, even thousands of years.
By contrast, National Monument designation can prevent unwise
resource extraction on sensitive landscapes that hold incredible
natural and cultural value. Whether we're talking about the sensitive
cultural and ecological landscape of Bears Ears, the forests of
Katahdin Woods and Waters, or the still largely unknown depths of the
Northeast Canyon and Seamounts--National Monument status can quickly
and effectively provide significant immediate protection, allowing for
more thoughtful management planning to take place and giving Congress
the time and opportunity to consider greater protection down the road
if needed. It should be no surprise that almost half of our treasured
National Parks started as National Monuments, including many of our
most popular parks: Teton, Grand Canyon, Acadia, Zion, Olympic, and
Arches. National Monument management plans offer an opportunity for
diverse stakeholders to come to the table together, to discuss and plan
for truly sustainable use of the landscape--allowing sensitive areas to
have a rest, while simultaneously enabling a greater swath of the
public to access, enjoy, and gain benefit from the area. The beauty of
thoughtful management is that long-standing uses of the landscape can
be grandfathered in where appropriate--for example, ranching, hunting,
firewood gathering, and similar activities. Thus, a National Monument,
while off limits to corporate oil and gas development, is not an
exclusive model at all, but instead can host a variety of activities
and groups of people, many of whom have had life-long and multi-
generational connection to the place. Finally, in terms of long-term
impact vs. short-term gain, there is no more convincing argument than
the fact that National Monument protection can keep more fossil fuels
in the ground, preventing further impact to our climate.
______
Ms. Haaland. Thank you, Mr. Cole.
The Chair now recognizes Dr. Elaine Oneil.
STATEMENT OF ELAINE ONEIL, ONEIL FOREST RESEARCH AND
MANAGEMENT, TENINO, WASHINGTON
Dr. Oneil. Thank you, Chairman Haaland and Committee
members. I am Dr. Elaine Oneil, a forest scientist and
management consultant specializing in forest health, climate
change, and forest carbon accounting.
Today, I will be providing comments on research I conducted
at the University of Washington that examined the impacts of
climate change on forest carbon in the 11 western states. That
is contiguous states; we didn't look at Alaska. These results
speak to the heart of the question before you today: What
climate impacts are occurring on our public lands, and what
adaptation opportunities exist?
I am going to place that research into context using
examples from Washington State, my home state.
First, some easy math. Trees take up carbon dioxide out of
the atmosphere and use it to make wood, roots, needles, leaves,
and branches, ending up at about 50 percent carbon by dry
weight. Superficial analysis suggests that the more trees we
have, the more carbon dioxide they can suck out of the
atmosphere.
That is only true if you ignore biological principles that
dictate forest growth and death related to site carrying
capacity. And in our western forest landscapes--and we have a
lot of Members here representing them, and it is also where
most of our public lands are located--that is only true if we
ignore fire, which would be a mistake.
What we are seeing in the western United States is an
epidemic of insects and disease and wildfires brought on, in
large part, by what one of your Federal scientists calls an
``epidemic of too many trees.'' He talked about that epidemic
of too many trees at a recent TEDx talk called ``The Era of
Mega-Fires,'' and I have to say we are in an era of megafires.
When we first began the analysis of climate impacts on
forest carbon in these 11 western states we used both
historical fire rates for the region, and fire rates that were
predicted to occur by 2050. A look at the wildfire statistics
since 2000 is sobering. We have doubled the average acres
burned since 2000, with 10 of the worst fire years on record
occurring since that time, and that doesn't even count last
year. The statistics aren't in on that date.
That means that the climate science published as late as
2004 was wildly optimistic. We are seeing future expected fire
rates 30 years earlier than anticipated.
So, what do we do about these climate impacts? It is a bit
counter-intuitive, but we cut more trees. This wildly unpopular
idea has been the recommendation of fire scientists who have
studied the fire ecology of these systems for decades. This is
not new information. It is completely in line with our fire and
carbon analysis that examined nine management alternatives
across 25,000 forest inventory plots in the West. In other
words, we didn't cherry-pick the data; we looked at every plot
and said what would happen here.
In most cases, managing forests creates a more favorable
forest outcome than letting nature take its course. Like any
other potential natural disaster, whether driven by climate
change or not, wildfire mitigation demands a response.
[Slide.]
Dr. Oneil. Forest inventory data already show that two-
thirds of the Federal forest growth is lost to wildfire,
insects, and disease, as shown on this chart on the wall. In
some states, mortality already exceeds growth, meaning the
forests are now carbon sources and not sinks. In other words,
they are emitting more than they are absorbing.
So, while forests do store carbon, when they are left
without care the results are usually not what we want. Clearly,
letting nature take its course did not provide much carbon
benefit, especially since the climate impacts we are seeing are
real, current, and often devastating.
We know how to mitigate these climate impacts at both the
stand and landscape level. It starts with greatly reducing the
number of trees, keeping fire-resistant species, and
interrupting fuel ladders so the fires don't spread as easily.
Across the West, this treatment has been proven to keep forests
alive when wildfires hit, and they will hit. That is
inevitable. It is part of the fire ecology of the system. They
can be easily replicated across the landscape using a
systematic approach that considers adjacent landowners in order
to create a patchwork of defensible space that is actually more
akin to what our natural forests looked like than they do now.
Coordination across landowners is required, so is
infrastructure that can handle the harvested material. Even
with the best of intentions, we will not be successful unless
efforts are made to ensure milling infrastructure remains
viable. Shared stewardship approaches like we have in
Washington State, including the Good Neighbor Authority and
local forests collaboratives, should continue to be supported
and encouraged as a fundamental mechanism to move forward with
keeping our public lands and adjacent forestlands healthy, fire
resilient, and green.
Thank you.
[The prepared statement of Ms. Oneil follows:]
Prepared Statement of Dr. Elaine Oneil, Oneil Forest Research and
Management
I am Dr. Elaine Oneil, a forest scientist and management consultant
specializing in forest health, climate change, and forest carbon
accounting. My comments are focused on research I conducted while at
the University of Washington that examined the impacts of climate
change on forest carbon in the 11 western states. Key results from that
research, combined with data on wildfire impacts, forest management,
and regional forest health strategies will be used to provide context
for the comments.
Commentary can be categorized into four main themes:
1. Forests are suffering from too many trees for the site and extant
climate conditions. Overstocking creates conditions that
kill trees. That mortality combined with wildfire has
changed the calculus for defining the optimal strategies
for climate mitigation and adaptation in forests.
2. Management provides for improved firefighting capability and
improved forest carbon outcomes in nearly every forest type
across the 11 western states.
3. Wildfire ignition is random, but the consequences of wildfires
are driven by forest cover conditions, climate, and
prevailing weather patterns. Forests that have too many
trees, and which contain large amounts of dead trees,
produce conditions for wildfires that are uncontrollable,
with devastating consequences to the forest, the adjacent
landowners and communities, and the budgets of land
management agencies.
4. Like any other potential natural disaster, wildfire mitigation
demands a response. Letting nature take its course is not
supported by the science of forest carbon dynamics.
forest carbon primer
Trees remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere using
photosynthesis to produce wood, roots, needles, leaves, and branches.
Carbon is also released via respiration, either directly from the
plant, or indirectly via decomposition or combustion pathways. Growth,
and therefore carbon accumulation in forests is constrained by limiting
factors that range from climatic parameters driving growing season,
moisture and temperature conditions, to nutrient availability,
competition, and species growth habit and longevity. There is some
variability in carbon content between tree components and species but
on average trees are about 50 percent carbon by dry weight. This has
led some to suggest that leaving forests to grow without management or
interruption would be a sound climate solution. That is only true if
you ignore biological principles that dictate forest growth and death,
including site carrying capacity. And in our western forest landscapes
where most of our public lands are located, that is only true if you
ignore fire.
1. Forests are suffering from having too many trees for the site and
extant climate conditions. Overstocking creates conditions that kill
trees. That mortality combined with wildfire has changed the calculus
for defining the optimal strategies for climate mitigation and
adaptation in forests.
What we are seeing in the western United States is an epidemic--of
insects and disease and wildfires--brought on in large part by An
Epidemic of Too Many Trees. That epidemic is summarized in a TED talk
called the Era of Megafires and is described it in much greater detail
in a hour long multimedia presentation that is available here. Wildfire
data from the National Interagency Fire Center supports the idea that
we are in an Era of Megafires. Their wildfire statistics show that the
average acres burned since 2000 has doubled relative to the prior four
decades, with 10 of the worst fire years on record occurring since 2000
(excluding 2018 data which is not available yet).
Every 10 years a U.S. forest inventory report (Resource Planning
Assessment or RPA) is published that summarizes growth, harvest, and
mortality by region, forest landowner, and forest type. Data are
collected over a 10-year period, so the final numbers are more
representative of an average for the 10-year period than a summary of
the endpoint. These data show a fourfold increase in mortality on
National Forests in the 40-year period from 1976-2016. Of total forest
growth on National Forests about two-thirds is lost to wildfires,
insects and disease (Figure 1). Wildfire is not the only mortality
agent that is on the rise on Federal lands. Insects and diseases are
prevalent and their threat is growing (Littell et al. 2010).
[GRAPHIC NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT]
Figure 1. Growth, Mortality, and Harvest on National Forest
Timberlands 1952-2016. Data provided by Oswalt et al. 2018.
The current rate of mortality is unsustainable. This may well lead
to a tipping point wherein additional uncontrolled damage can be
expected. It is doubtful that any one scientist or group of scientists
has any idea where that tipping point is and what reaching it might
cause. With policies and management approaches that pull us back from
that brink by reducing risk and building resilience we can ensure that
these forests remain a part of our heritage and serve a vital role as
carbon sinks into the future.
2. Management provides for improved firefighting capability and
improved forest carbon outcomes in nearly every forest type across the
11 western states.
Fire scientists who have studied the fire ecology of these systems
for decades have long advocated for management action to mitigate fire
risk and bring the forest condition into alignment with the fire
ecology of the west (Agee and Skinner 2005, Skinner et al. 2004). Fire
impacts can be substantially reduced by thinning treatments that
restore densities more like those observed before fire suppression was
introduced. Multiple studies have shown that thinning reduces fire
severity, sufficient for firefighters to gain control and maintain
forest structure, tree seed source, and other values (e.g. Agee and
Skinner 2005, Moghaddas 2006, Skinner et al. 2004). General principles
of fire management based on long-term research have been integrated
into tools that can assess the impacts of fire and management for any
combination of site, stand and climate conditions. These tools were
used to model nine different forest management treatments on over
25,000 forest inventory plots in Arizona, California, Colorado, Idaho,
Montana, New Mexico, Nevada, Oregon, Utah, Washington, and Wyoming.
Results show that in most cases, managing forests created a more
favorable forest carbon outcome (Figure 2b) than letting nature take
its course (Figure 2a).
[GRAPHIC NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT]
Figure 2a. Unmanaged forest with 100% mortality from wildfire.
Figure 2b. Managed forest with jackpot burns to reduce fuel loads.
Even better carbon outcomes are possible if harvested material is
large enough to be used for solid wood products as the wood also stores
carbon during its use phase (Oneil and Lippke 2010).
Research identifies how to mitigate climate impacts at both the
stand and landscape level. In dry forests it starts with greatly
reducing the number of trees, keeping fire resistant species, and
interrupting fuel ladders so that fires don't spread as easily
(Moghaddas 2006). Across the West, this treatment method has been
proven to keep forests alive when wildfires hit. It can be easily
replicated across the landscape using a systematic approach that
considers adjacent landowners, in order to create a patchwork of
defensible space that is more akin to historical natural conditions on
our forests.
Under future climate conditions which predict longer, drier,
hotter, summers (Littell et al. 2010, McKenzie et al. 2004) we can
expect regeneration failure in burned forests, which will push these
forests toward being a net carbon source. Mitigation measures include
thinning the forests to prevent the loss of all trees and to reduce the
fire impacts on soils somewhat so that successful regeneration is more
likely. By thinning we also are building resilience into the existing
trees, and ideally choosing the specimens and species that we think can
survive and perpetuate on these landscapes.
3. Wildfire ignition is random, but the consequences of wildfires are
driven by forest cover conditions, climate, and prevailing weather
patterns. Forests that have too many trees, and which contain large
amounts of dead trees, produce conditions for wildfires that are
uncontrollable, with devastating consequences to the forest, the
adjacent landowners (Figure 3) and communities, and the budgets of land
management agencies.
Coordination across landowners is required. So is infrastructure
that can handle the harvested material. Shared stewardship approaches
like we have in Washington State, including use of the Good Neighbor
Authority and local Forest Collaboratives, should continue to be
supported and encouraged as a fundamental mechanism to move forward
with keeping our public lands, and adjacent forest lands, healthy, fire
resilient, and green.
[GRAPHIC NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT]
Figure 3. Wildfire impacts on adjacent state and private forest
land from ignition on public forestland.
4. Like any other potential natural disaster, wildfire mitigation
demands a response. Letting nature take its course is not supported by
the science of forest carbon dynamics.
Jerry Franklin (ecologist) and Jim Agee (fire scientist) from the
University of Washington offer their perspective on the need for a
rationale national forest policy that incorporates ecology, fire
science, known benefits of treatment and social benefits. Their
perspective is that ``Letting nature take its course in the current
landscape is certain to result in losses of native biodiversity and
ecosystem functions and other social benefits . . .'' (Franklin and
Agee 2003).
Other social benefits include smoke free summers. Emissions from
wildfires are not inconsequential. In addition to the large amounts of
carbon dioxide released, there are also releases of methane, nitrous
oxides, and volatile organic carbons which are all potent greenhouse
gases that have a greater atmospheric impact than the release of carbon
dioxide alone (Wiedinmyer and Neff 2007). The net result is that
emissions from wildfires can produce higher carbon dioxide equivalent
values than the total equivalent carbon dioxide equivalent
(CO2e) content of the biomass that is consumed (data
analysis of factors in Wiedinmyer et al. 2006). This means that a 20
percent reduction in forest carbon stocks from wildfire generates more
than a 20 percent increase in CO2e in the atmosphere.
summary
We have experienced two decades of unprecedented mortality in our
western forests, and much of that mortality is concentrated on Federal
lands. In some states, mortality on public forests has reached a point
where they are now emitting carbon rather than sequestering it thus
exacerbating our current greenhouse gas emissions profile. Forest
health treatments that reduce tree density, create canopy
discontinuities, and open patches will become both the climate
mitigation and adaptation strategy on these forests. They will also
more closely replicate historical forest conditions. Letting forests
die and burn in anticipation that the past will replicate itself in a
future with large uncertainties around climate conditions is a high-
risk approach.
references
Agee, J.K. and C.N. Skinner. 2005. Basic principles of forest fuel
reduction treatments. Forest Ecology and Management. 211(1-2): 83-96.
Franklin, Jerry F. and James K. Agee. 2003. Forging a science-based
national forest fire policy. Issues in Science and Technology 20(1):
59-66.
Littell, Jeremy S., et al. 2010. Forest ecosystems, disturbance, and
climatic change in Washington State, USA. Climatic Change 102(1-2):
129-158.
McKenzie, D., et al. 2004. ``Climatic change, wildfire, and
conservation.'' Conservation Biology 18(4): 890-902.
Moghaddas, J.J. 2006. A fuel treatment reduces potential fire severity
and increases suppression efficiency in a Sierran mixed conifer forest.
In: Andrews, P. L. and B. W. Butler (comps). Fuels Management--How to
Measure Success, Proceedings RMRS-P-41, Fort Collins, Colorado: U.S.
Department of Agriculture, Forest Service, Rocky Mountain Research
Station. p. 441-449.
Oneil, Elaine E. and Bruce R. Lippke. 2010. Integrating products,
emission offsets and wildfire into carbon assessments of Inland
Northwest forest. Wood and Fiber Science 42(Special Issue): 144-164.
Skinner, C.N., et al. 2004. Effects of prescribed fire and thinning on
wildfire severity: the Cone Fire, Blacks Mountain Experimental Forest,
Proceedings 25th Vegetation Management Conference, Redding, California.
12 pp.
Wiedinmyer, C. and J.C. Neff. 2007. Estimates of CO2 from fires in the
United States: implications for carbon management. Carbon Balance and
Management 2(10): doi:10.1186/1750-0680-2-10.
Wiedinmyer, C., et al. (2006). ``Estimating emissions from fires in
North America for air quality modeling.'' Atmospheric Environment
40(19): 3419-3432.
______
Ms. Haaland. Thank you very much, Dr. Oneil. Thank you for
the valuable testimony that you have given this morning.
The Chair will now recognize Members for questions. Under
Committee Rule 3(d), each Member will be recognized for 5
minutes. And I would like to recognize myself first for 5
minutes.
My question to each of you--and if you could just each
answer this one after the other, that would be great--thank you
all again for being here and for your testimony.
As I mentioned in my statement, I am excited for this
Subcommittee to take the lead on these issues. To fill that
role, we need to recognize that now is the time to act on
climate change. We can't wait any longer. While some response
efforts may be beyond this Committee's purview, the impacts of
climate change affect the resources, lands, and communities we
are here to protect. So, it is our responsibility to consider
all options.
My first question for each of you is, can we prevent the
worst impacts of climate change by land management strategies
alone?
Dr. Gonzalez. Land management strategies and adaptation are
important for improving ecosystem integrity. But our research
shows that, compared to the worst emission scenario, cutting
carbon pollution could reduce projected heating in the national
parks by up to two-thirds. And clearly, that attacks the cause
of climate change.
Ms. Haaland. Thank you. Dr. Hansen?
Dr. Hansen. I agree that one of the most important things
we can do is adjust our land use. And in reality, almost
everything in the United States is affected by land use. Our
transportation habits are affected by land use. Our energy
consumption habits, both transportation and our homes, are
affected by land use. However, at the end of the day, the core
component that we have to take care of is addressing the root
cause of climate change. We need to stop emitting greenhouse
gases into the atmosphere from the combustion of fossil fuels.
Ms. Haaland. Thank you.
Mr. Cole. I would say, from our perspective, we need to use
all the techniques at our disposal. Land management is
certainly one of them. We need to look at the types of land
management. Protected public lands can help us make space for
renewable energy and reduce our emphasis on fossil fuel
extraction across the country, which can provide a massive
impact on the amount of carbon in the atmosphere.
But we also need to think about other ways of addressing
the climate crisis, including regenerative organic agriculture
and looking at our entire energy mix across the board. Thank
you.
Ms. Haaland. Thank you.
Dr. Oneil. I think that land management alone cannot
address or prevent the worst impacts. But if you look at the
way within the wheelhouse of forests and forest management,
part of the way we look at that and we think about it is if you
are able to maintain that sort of average forest carbon in your
landscape, and then use those products to substitute for other
products that have a higher greenhouse gas footprint, like
steel and concrete, then you do have an opportunity to have an
additive effect, based on how you use any kind of material that
would be removed if you were removing those trees.
There are some complicated processes in there, but there is
a possibility to actually leverage land management and land use
activities where they are allowed--obviously, not in parks, but
where they are allowed--to achieve additional benefits in terms
of greenhouse gas mitigation.
Ms. Haaland. Thank you, Dr. Oneil. I am glad we largely
agree on that point.
Now, Dr. Hansen, can you please explain why adaptation,
particularly on public lands, can help us fight the impacts of
climate change?
Dr. Hansen. I would be happy to. Adaptation offers you the
opportunity to try to maintain the function of whatever it is
you are trying to do. In this case, it is the function of
public lands, which are vitally important to all of our lives,
whether we live in a city or we live in more rural parts of the
country.
Adaptation allows us to reflect directly on what are the
implications that we anticipate happening from climate change,
and how do we change management to respond to that. That will
affect our ability to access water, for example.
In the Sierra Nevada of California, the way that those
forests are managed provides water for most of the largest
places in the state. Water is, obviously, a big issue there.
But if we continue to manage the water resource and the forest
resource, as we always have, ignoring the facts that
precipitation patterns are changing, ignoring the fact that
human use rates are changing because of increasing
temperatures, we will not have the rate of return that we
expect on those resources. And public lands are probably one of
the best insurance investments we have in maintaining all those
ecosystem services for our country.
Ms. Haaland. Thank you, Dr. Hansen. And now the Chair
recognizes Ranking Member Young for 5 minutes of questions.
Mr. Young. Thank you, Madam Chairman.
Mr. Cole, Patagonia, what do they sell?
Mr. Cole. We are an outdoor clothing and gear company.
Mr. Young. OK. And where are most of those products made?
Mr. Cole. We have a supply chain that is global in nature.
We manufacture----
Mr. Young. Where are they mostly made?
Mr. Cole. Across about 20 different countries, from the
United States to China and----
Mr. Young. Most of them are made in China. I happened to go
to your store. And the ironic part about it is most of your
products are a result of fossil fuels. They are made by fossil
fuels, the material is fossil fuels. They are made in China.
The biggest polluter we have is China. And I often think it is
hypocrisy to talk about we cannot use fossil fuels when the
product they sell and advocate against is made by fossil
fuels--in China, not with American labor. I just wanted to
bring that up.
Dr. Oneil, some environmental activists argue that fuel
loads or too many trees are not a problem. However, in your
testimony you argue the epidemic of insects and disease in our
western forests have been brought down in a large measure by an
epidemic of too many trees. How does that work, too many trees?
Dr. Oneil. The work that myself and other scientists in
that space--as opposed to activists, we work as scientists. We
look at the numbers, and we look at the data.
If you are wanting to mitigate fire impacts, you have to
think about it within the framework of how does fire actually
work, and it is real simple. It is what is called a fire
triangle. You have fuels, oxygen, and heat. The only thing we
can affect in the fire triangle is the fuels. The more fuel you
have, and the drier it is--which that will be exacerbated with
warmer weather, drier weather, longer seasons--the more fuel
you have, the more chance that when you get that lightning
strike, when you get that ignition source, that you are going
to end up with a catastrophic event.
Fire ecologists have been talking about this for 40 years,
that this is a problem. And it is continuing to be a problem.
And now we are seeing that it is a problem.
Mr. Young. You bring up a very valid point. For those
members on the Committee from California, when I was 5 years
old we were pasturing sheep in Paradise. My father and I had
5,000 ewes. And we didn't have any fires of any consequence
because there was no over-burden, no volatility that was left
on the ground.
And what I see now, when there is a fire, there is so much
heat that it destroys the tree and actually destroys a lot of
the ground, which probably would add later on with more trash
timber than real timber. And I just--I watch that fire.
By the way, how many acres did you burn? Anybody know?
Anybody ever put a pencil to it?
[No response.]
Mr. Young. I want to get the science, how much pollution
was put in the air by that fire. A lot.
I think if they had managed it to begin with, you wouldn't
have that fire. There is the big argument. Are we going to let
the trees still be natural, or are we going to manage the
timber? We have to manage the timber. But you even mention
cutting the tree and, ``Oh, we can't do that,'' including those
people who sell goods made in China. You can't do it.
But in reality, if we don't do it, we will never address
this issue. That is called adapting. That is all I ask, is
think about adapt. Just don't automatically say no.
I yield back the balance of my time.
Ms. Haaland. Thank you, Mr. Young. The Chair now recognizes
Mr. Grijalva.
Mr. Grijalva. Thank you, Madam Chair. And to you and to the
members of this Committee, thank you very much for the hearing.
I want to associate myself with some of your comments at
the outset, Madam Chair, and that was climate change isn't just
in our jurisdiction. I think it falls under the shared
responsibility for all Members, all decision makers. And I
think this Subcommittee and the Committee as a whole plays a
big role, a very expansive role, in addressing climate change.
And within that jurisdiction, a very large nexus to be able to
address those issues. So, I appreciate you mentioning that,
because I think it is important to keep that in mind.
Dr. Hansen, let me ask you, both your and Dr. Gonzalez's
work suggest that we need to protect more places from the
dangers of climate change. An example that you could respond
to, Dr. Hansen, is the Sky Islands along the southern border
region in Arizona as a place for further protection. Can you
speak about that, specifically, in terms of those Sky Islands
being potential adaptation tools on the issue of climate
change?
Dr. Hansen. One of the effects of climate change that was
alluded to in testimony today is about the movement of
ecosystems and species in response to climate change. In order
for that movement to happen, there has to be a place for that
to happen.
The Sky Islands Region offers a unique suite of opportunity
because, not only does it involve space that moves up in
latitude to some degree, but it also creates elevational
refugia, places that stay a little bit cooler, perhaps, as the
overall landscape is changing, and places for things to move.
Thinking about how we use the space we have to allow
natural systems to respond to the extent they can by themselves
in conditions like that is a vital component of adaptation. We
do not have the money to hand-manage all of the systems. We do
not have the ability to move species manually. We need to come
up with how do we create an intact landscape across which
things can move on their own.
Mr. Grijalva. Thank you very much.
Mr. Cole, based partly on Dr. Hansen's response and the
testimony today, we talk about these efforts at adaptation. The
Land and Water Conservation Fund, of which your organization
and your business have been large supporters of, what role do
you believe that plays in the discussion?
Mr. Cole. I think the Land and Water Conservation Fund is
one of our most important conservation measures in the United
States. It has impacts in every single state, almost every
single county across the country. And it takes a small amount
of money from revenues from offshore drilling and leasing, and
puts that into conservation. And I think that, whether you are
living in a community that has city parks, or whether you are
living in a community that is close to wilderness area, you
could be helped by the Land and Water Conservation Fund.
And with climate change, we need more of those protected
spaces to allow for resilience, to allow for protection of
biodiversity, to allow for carbon storage, all those things.
The Land and Water Conservation Fund can contribute to all
those benefits in the face of climate change.
Mr. Grijalva. And last, Dr. Hansen, you served on the
Advisory Committee on Climate Change and Natural Resources
Science under the previous administration. Let's take a
snapshot of where we are right now, in the last 2 years, under
this Administration.
Dr. Hansen. Unfortunately, that committee no longer exists.
Mr. Grijalva. Any action on the findings?
Dr. Hansen. No. In fact, most of the suggestions that were
made by that committee, the structures that were part of that
set of ideas, that set of principles no longer exists, or are
quite vestigial with no funding.
Mr. Grijalva. If you could respond, there was a beginning
effort of utilizing public lands as an adaptation vehicle going
forward. And that has stopped, as well. The issue now becomes,
are we contributing to the overall negative effect of climate
change as public lands, or retreating from any commitment to
adaptation. Are we part of the problem now, as opposed to being
part of the solution?
Dr. Hansen. Yes. I mean, unfortunately, the dominant
contribution of greenhouse gases to the atmosphere from public
lands is our use of them for the extraction of fossil fuels.
And increasing that increases the problem not only for all of
us, but for public lands themselves. We need to be stopping
climate change to save our public lands, not using our public
lands to stop climate change, as a friend of mine would be
paraphrased to say.
Mr. Grijalva. Thank you very much.
Madam Chair, I yield back. Thank you.
Ms. Haaland. Thank you, Mr. Grijalva. The Chair now
recognizes Mr. Westerman.
Mr. Westerman. Thank you, Madam Chair. Thank you to the
witnesses for being here today. I have read all of your
testimonies last night, plus listened to your testimonies
today.
Dr. Gonzalez, I would like to commend you on the written
testimony and the research behind the data that you presented.
And Dr. Oneil, as well, I appreciate you bringing to the
forefront things that need to be talked about, as far as the
benefits of healthy forests to helping our environment.
Dr. Gonzalez, part of your testimony, you said prescribed
burning is an adaptation measure that reduces future risk of
catastrophic wildfire and tree death by removing an unnatural
buildup of fuel and small trees, where old policies suppressed
natural wildfire. I agree with that.
Can you elaborate on that a little bit more about carrying
capacity of land and how many trees per acre? Is it just small
trees, or are there places where larger trees need to be
removed and then do the controlled burning?
Dr. Gonzalez. Well, the published scientific research shows
that two major factors have caused the catastrophic wildfires
that we are seeing. It is the old policies that have led to
this unnatural accumulation of small trees and, of course,
woody debris. And then human-caused climate change has ignited
that and doubled the wildfire since 1984.
Mr. Westerman. All right, I agree----
Dr. Gonzalez. It is mainly the small trees and the coarse,
woody debris.
Mr. Westerman. Right. And I agree the suppression tactics
over the decades have increased fire potential.
Dr. Oneil, would you like to talk about the carrying
capacity, stems per acre, or biomass per acre, and how that
contributes to more fires?
Dr. Oneil. Thank you. What we are dealing with in the
western United States in particular, we have done some research
looking at carrying capacity under these various alternative
scenarios of a warmer and drier region.
In 2010, we published this over-arching document that
looked at this carrying capacity issue, and realized that,
going forward, we might end up losing two, three, or more
species in particular areas because of increasing aridity.
What that really means is that there isn't enough water
there to sustain forests. As most people who live in the West
know, you have forests in places where you have a little bit
more moisture, and as soon as you leave those places and go
into more arid regions, it turns into grassland. So, we are
seeing that----
Mr. Westerman. I am going to have to move on, but I
appreciate you highlighting that part about the water. And I
know there were questions about the role of land management and
the role of adaptation management, which gets into water and
how important our healthy forests are for providing good water.
But there is one thing that I think is confusing out there,
and that is how managed forests helped to sequester more carbon
over the long run. I have a slide I would like to put up.
[Slide.]
Mr. Westerman. It is very hard to see, especially at that
scale. But basically, the top chart shows an unmanaged forest
over 160 years. The bottom chart shows a managed forest. And
those curved lines are the amount of carbon stored over that
time frame. That is a logarithmic scale, so that is actually 10
times more carbon on the bottom than on the top.
And when you use these wood products, you are storing the
wood in buildings. If you look at not managing the forest, the
top chart, and the one in the middle is where you do harvest
every 70 years, the one on the top does store more carbon. But
the one on the bottom, because you are storing the carbon in
buildings--plus, the amount of energy that it takes to produce
wood versus other building materials, which that was alluded
to.
And if you will, put the next slide up there.
[Slide.]
Mr. Westerman. This is another very-hard-to-see chart. But
the black line there in the middle, the large black line, that
is the amount of cement--on the first column--that China used
in 2017. The very top one is how much the United States used.
So, China used 2.4 billion tons of cement in 2017. That is
three times more than the United States used in the previous 10
years combined. And then we look at using wood in a building
as--it takes 1.9 times more energy, more fossil fuels to
produce concrete than it does to produce wood. So, you get this
huge cumulative effect, globally, when you substitute wood for
other materials.
I wish we had more time to talk about this. I am out.
Ms. Haaland. Thank you, Mr. Westerman.
The Chair now recognizes Ms. DeGette.
Ms. DeGette. Thank you very much, Madam Chair, and
congratulations on your new position. I want to congratulate
the Chair on having her very first hearing as a hearing on
climate change, which is so important for our public lands and
for our country.
I also sit on the Energy and Commerce Committee, and we had
a hearing last week on climate change. I asked the panel a
question that I am going to also ask this panel here today,
vis-a-vis public lands. And it will require only a yes or no
answer, so we will start with you, Dr. Gonzalez.
And the question is, is climate change real, largely due to
human activity, a source of profound risk to the health,
safety, and welfare of our country, including to our public
lands, and something we urgently need to address? Yes or no?
Dr. Gonzalez. Yes.
Ms. DeGette. Dr. Hansen?
Dr. Hansen. Yes.
Ms. DeGette. Mr. Cole?
Mr. Cole. Yes.
Ms. DeGette. Dr. Oneil?
Dr. Oneil. Yes.
Ms. DeGette. Thank you very much. And as I said last week
in Energy and Commerce, the very fact that we have a bipartisan
panel here who all agree with the basic foundation of what we
need to address is actually a big step forward for Congress.
And it gives me great hope that we can work in a bipartisan way
on really addressing these issues.
As a westerner, I see the impacts on our public lands for
myself. And I just have a few follow-up questions.
Dr. Gonzalez, you testified that temperatures have
increased in national parks more than other places. Could you
briefly tell us why that is?
Dr. Gonzalez. National parks are located in our most
extreme environments: in the Arctic, in high elevation
mountains, and in the arid Southwest. And those are the areas
that climate change is exposing more. And that is where we have
placed----
Ms. DeGette. They are the most vulnerable areas. Would that
be----
Dr. Gonzalez. Yes, they are the most exposed. And America's
most special places, the national parks, happen to be located
in those extreme environments.
Ms. DeGette. Dr. Oneil, I wanted to talk with you about
some issues, because I think we agree on a lot, which is when
you would have a forest, normally that would help offset carbon
emissions. But as you accurately point out in your testimony,
when you have massive forest fires, that increases carbon
emissions. Would that be a fair assessment of your testimony?
Dr. Oneil. That is a fair assessment.
Ms. DeGette. Thank you.
Dr. Oneil. The difficulty is that the global carbon budgets
don't actually count emissions from public lands as something
that is human caused, so they get excluded.
Ms. DeGette. We should probably fix that.
But one of the things that you testified about is the
increased vulnerability of our forests from issues of aridity
and also things like insects, which we have seen in Colorado
and throughout the rest of the Rocky Mountain West very
dramatically the last few years.
Scientists say that the reason why we have had the
devastating pine beetle kill, for example, in our western
forests is in large part because of climate change, because it
doesn't get cold enough in the winters any more to kill the
insects. Would you agree with that statement about pine
beetles?
Dr. Oneil. No.
Ms. DeGette. You don't?
Dr. Oneil. No, because that is the focus of my Ph.D. And,
in fact, in Colorado and the southern states, it is not colder
winters, it is hotter summers that is causing----
Ms. DeGette. But in any event, the hotter summers are due
to climate impacts, correct?
Dr. Oneil. When you see these changes----
Ms. DeGette. You know what? I only have a minute left. Can
you answer that yes or no?
Dr. Oneil. There is that pattern that is in that system----
Ms. DeGette. Right. So, I will say if we address the
climate issues as Dr. Hansen was talking about, if we can keep
climate change down below 2 degrees, that will help with the
initial causes of the devastating forest fires that we have, as
well as other issues. And that is what I think we need to look
at.
And one last thing I will say. I was just telling
Congressman Huffman forest management is really important in a
lot of these areas. And to my view, one of the reasons why we
have had such devastating fires is previous forest management
plans where we didn't let naturally occurring fires burn. But
now we have millions of acres in the West, millions of acres of
public lands. The idea that we would harvest wood from these
areas in order to have better forest management is just simply
not tenable. We have to work on a lot of other issues, and we
have to be practicable.
Thank you, Madam Chair.
Ms. Haaland. Thank you, Ms. DeGette. The Chair now
recognizes Mr. Hice.
Dr. Hice. Thank you, Madam Chair.
Today, we are engaging in--from my count, at least--this
Committee's fifth hearing on anthropogenic climate change and
the horrible consequences that will occur unless, of course--
and this is my concern--unless we take action which includes
massively expanding government, ultimately destroying
federalism, and restricting individual liberties.
And I go back and look at the first five hearings of the
115th Congress that this Committee had, and it included
modernizing water and power infrastructure, improving
infrastructure for tribal and insular communities, examining
management of marine sanctuaries, improving infrastructure for
National Park Service and Forest Service, and how best to use
our natural raw materials for national security.
But today, again, if my count is correct, we have the fifth
hearing--this time in the National Parks, Forests, and Public
Lands Subcommittee, in what amounts to me as a publicity stage
for the Green New Deal, which is championed by many of my
colleagues across the aisle. And this resolution--which, of
course, was named, at least recalls the name from FDR's New
Deal, which, arguably, intended to put Americans back to work--
this resolution does just the opposite.
In fact, one really has to wonder, in looking at the
details of this, whether or not there will actually be new
regulations that would be created regarding the manner in which
we breathe because of the carbon dioxide that we ourselves
produce.
This deal calls for a massive mobilization of resources,
resources that could be more appropriately used to pay down
$11.6 billion in Park Service maintenance backlog, which, of
course, Chairman Grijalva and Republican Leader Bishop in a
bipartisan manner put forth last Congress in the Restore Our
Parks Act.
And I can't recall the number of times that I have heard
from my colleagues across the aisle talking and complaining
about how offshore oil rigs so far off they can't even be seen,
and yet they ruin our environment. But this Democratic plan
would now call for hundreds of thousands of square miles of
wind turbines and solar panels. More precisely, a 2015 study by
Stanford engineers noted that to meet the Nation's power needs
entirely with clean energy would require almost 500,000 on- and
off-shore wind turbines and over 75 million solar panels, and
would cost roughly $7 trillion.
All of this new infrastructure would somehow, amazingly,
not run into any problems with the Endangered Species Act or
Clean Waters Act, and environmental impact studies would
apparently just sail right through the approval process,
although in this Committee we have had countless witnesses
testify that oftentimes we are looking at a 7- to 10-year
average of getting some of these permits.
This is potentially, I would say, the Green New Deal's only
winning strategy, which I would assume supporters on the other
side would aggressively help to overhaul, some of the
ridiculous burdensome hoops that must be jumped through. And I
would certainly welcome that conversation.
But overall, I am extremely disappointed with the direction
of this Committee and the Subcommittees in these first few
weeks of business. It seems to have taken the very important
issue we have of managing the American people's natural
resources and disguise the Committee as one focused on climate
alarmism.
No doubt clean air, clean water, and healthy environment
are important issues, one that I certainly want to help pass on
to my children and my grandchildren. But so is the business of
managing our Federal lands and parks, and making sure that we
are focused on the issues like the national parks' maintenance
backlog and a host of other issues. This is an immediate
concern to the function of these parks, so that they continue
to be enjoyed.
My hope is that in the near future we will come back to
this Committee's agenda to match more closely the mission and
our jurisdiction, and that we would get away from these
continued rainbow and unicorn promises of the fairyland Green
New Deal.
With that, Madam Chairman, I yield back.
Ms. Haaland. Thank you so much, Mr. Hice. The Chair now
recognizes Mr. Neguse.
Mr. Neguse. Thank you, Madam Chair. And also,
congratulations to you on your election. And I appreciate the
opportunity to participate in this hearing, and the fact that
this first hearing of the Subcommittee is on such an important
issue, and as existential an issue as climate change.
I would just say, with respect to my colleague on the other
side of the aisle, I respectfully disagree in the framing of
this hearing as a publicity stage or publicity stunt, something
to that effect. I think this hearing is an opportunity for
members of this Committee to hear from some world-renowned
experts and scientists in their respective fields, both
witnesses from the Majority and the Minority. And I have
appreciated, actually, the give and take and some of the
thoughtful questions with respect to forest management, and so
forth.
So, I think that this could hardly be described as a
publicity stage, that this is, in fact, an important
Subcommittee hearing on the defining issue of our time, which
is the planetary crisis that we find ourselves in.
Dr. Hansen, I found your testimony very compelling with
respect to your comment to testifying in 2004. As I mentioned
at the last Full Committee meeting, my wife and I are new
parents. I have a 6-month-old. Or she is 5 months, 2 weeks old,
Natalie, our daughter. And I think a lot about the work that we
do here in the context of the world that she will inherit.
When some of the most catastrophic consequences of climate
change are set to occur at the IPCC report and, of course, we
have several members of the IPCC here with us today, my
daughter will be 12 years old, 13 years old. So, it really
brings into clarity just how important the work is that this
Committee is undertaking. I appreciate the Chairwoman holding
the hearing, and the Members participating, and, of course, the
witnesses, for joining us today.
I want to ask a question of Dr. Gonzalez. And you
referenced Rocky Mountain National Park. I happen to represent
the great state of Colorado, Northern Colorado, Boulder, Fort
Collins, and Rocky Mountain National Park. I have spent my life
as a child and a young adult and, of course, now, as a father,
going to the park and enjoying the park as so many countless
Americans do. You talked a lot about the consequences, just in
terms of how our national parks are faring as a result of
climate change, including Rocky Mountain National Park. I guess
I am wondering if you can put a finer point on what we are to
expect in the coming years if we don't take decisive action.
I agree with Dr. Hansen, that inaction is just simply not
an option, but I am curious if you could provide sort of some
additional details about just how dire the consequences will be
for our national parks.
Dr. Gonzalez. Yes. Rocky Mountain actually has experienced,
historically, some of the more severe impacts of climate
change: the increased wildfire; the bark beetle kill, which,
across the western United States has been the most severe in
125 years; and the reduction of snow cover. If we don't reduce
carbon emissions from human activities, wildfire could
substantially increase--published research estimates in
Yellowstone an increase of 300 to 1,000 percent. And with the
increased aridity and the increase in bark beetles, more
massive tree death, tree mortality across the western United
States.
In addition, the wildlife right now in Yosemite National
Park, historically, wildlife have been shifting up-slope,
following the cooler temperatures. That shifting might go off
the top of mountains.
And in Lassen Volcanic National Park, the American pika,
small mammal, might completely lose its habitat and locally
disappear.
Mr. Neguse. Thank you, Dr. Gonzalez. My next question is
for Mr. Cole.
I want to thank you for your testimony, and certainly for
your leadership. I want to give you an opportunity to respond,
to the extent that you would like to, to the Ranking Member of
this Subcommittee's comments with respect to your company and
manufacturing and so forth. My understanding is Patagonia was a
founding member of the Sustainable Apparel Coalition, and does
quite a bit in that regard. So, I just want to make sure you
have an opportunity to respond to the extent you would like to.
Mr. Cole. Thank you. I appreciate that. In regards to our
company's activities and our approach to this problem, we have
a goal of being carbon neutral by 2025. This is in alignment
with 40 years of our work around sustainability, as you note.
And we are working hard across our entire supply chain to make
that happen.
We do make products around the world, in about 20 different
countries. We also are proud to make products in the United
States, and we support about 1,500 to 2,000 jobs in the United
States, depending on the season. We are proud of those
employees and that contribution to our economy here.
We are also a part of an $887 billion industry, the outdoor
recreation economy, that is present in the United States and
supports about 7.6 million U.S. jobs, direct jobs, that derive
directly from the protection of our public lands and from
having a climate that supports the kind of lifestyle and
economy that we are used to.
So, I would say, internationally, that having a global
supply chain is an advantage for us, in understanding this
global problem. And we are working with our suppliers in China,
frankly, and other places around the world to also address
these key issues. Climate is not just a problem for our
country, but it is a global problem, as well. Thank you.
Ms. Haaland. Thank you, Mr. Cole.
Thank you, Mr. Neguse.
Mr. Neguse. Thank you, I yield back.
Ms. Haaland. The Chair now recognizes Mr. Curtis.
Mr. Curtis. Thank you, Madam Chairman. I, with my
colleagues, would like to express my appreciation for the
opportunity to talk about this important topic. If any of you
have been to Utah, you will understand why I believe Utahans
have it in their DNA to be good stewards of this earth. It
comes quite naturally.
As a Boy Scout, I was taught to leave my campground cleaner
than I found it. And I actually believe that both Republicans
and Democrats believe that to be true. I regret the stereotypes
that are often formed around this issue. Somehow all
Republicans hate the environment and all Democrats are
alarmist. And I don't believe either of those stereotypes are
true. I hope we can find common ground as we talk.
You have heard from a lot of my colleagues today how
important the forests are. I would like to add to that. Clean
air and natural disaster resiliency, I think it is a mistake
not to be talking about resiliency to these natural disasters.
There has been, interestingly, something that, in my
opinion, has been totally missed in our dialogue today, and is
almost always missed in this dialogue in Washington, DC, and
that is the impact of local and state governments and elected
officials. I believe, personally, having been a former mayor,
that if you want to reduce it by 2 degrees, mayors know how to
solve this. And I think it is a mistake when we feel like there
is somehow one magic fix at the Federal level that we can
mandate in a one-size-fits-all to solve this problem.
And I want to give you a quick example. In Utah, in Salt
Lake City in Utah County, we have a unique problem, that we are
surrounded by mountains on all sides. And particularly in the
winter months, we get what is called an inversion, where a
high-pressure system comes in and traps there in those valleys.
And, therefore, if you ask Utahans what the largest
environmental crisis is, they will say clean air. And they will
say it about 15 times a year. Otherwise, we enjoy beautiful
mountain, clean air.
In response to this, our governor, in his last State of the
Union just several weeks ago, increased the money in his budget
not 2 times, not 3 times, but 117 times for clean air,
introducing initiatives with transit. And we have a big issue
with wood-burning stoves, and that was a big part of it,
electrical vehicles charging stations, things like that were
part of his plan.
I mentioned that I was mayor before I came here, and our
city recognized the need to take responsibility, and we
produced something called the Provo Clean Air Toolkit. The name
of the city is Provo. I would also invite all of you to Provo.
And I would hope that you would all search on the Internet for
the Provo Clean Air Toolkit. In it, I think you will see a
masterful plan for cities about what individuals can do, what
municipal government can do, what colleges can do, what
businesses can do to improve air quality.
We also introduced transit. We worked on walking and
biking. As the mayor, I committed to ride my bike to work 100
times in a given year to try to inspire my residents to do the
same.
We introduced renewables, we are a municipal power city. We
were 70 percent coal when I took over. We introduced renewables
and gave our residents a chance to buy as much as 100 percent
of their energy from renewables.
And one fun thing that we did is, we also recognized no
matter what we did as a government, unless the hearts and minds
of our residents were in tune with this need, that we could
accomplish nothing. So, we came up with what we called the
Provo Clean Air Challenge pledge, and we had several points
that we challenged our residents to do. We asked them to
carpool as much as possible.
We have a unique situation in Utah, where you can find a
church house on almost every corner. And most of us live within
walking distance of that church. Embarrassingly, the Curtis
family sometimes will take three cars to that church three or
four blocks away. And we are not the only ones, so challenging
my residents to carpool when it was appropriate.
Park and ride, instead of going into a drive-up restaurant
was on the list, not letting your vehicle idle for more than 30
seconds, and ride or bike or carpool and use public transit
wherever possible.
So, today I invite all of my colleagues to take this
challenge. And I have for you a pin that we wear on our lapel
in Provo, if any of you feel so inclined to take that personal
responsibility.
Thank you, Madam Chairman. The very first one I have given
out in Washington, DC.
But before my time expires, I would just like to really
emphasize how important it is that, first of all, as a Member
of Congress, we personally are doing what we can do before we
ask other people to do it. Are we changing our light bulbs? Are
we not using plastic bags, and all of those things?
And the second thing is to remember the power of local
government in solving this problem, and make sure that we are
empowering them and not ignoring them.
Thank you very much. I yield my time. Thank you.
Ms. Haaland. Yes, thank you, Mr. Curtis. I walk to work
every day. Just letting you know that. And I haven't used a
plastic disposable water bottle since I have been here on
Capitol Hill. So, thank you so much.
The Chair now recognizes Mr. Case.
Mr. Case. Thank you, Chair.
Dr. Oneil and Dr. Gonzalez, I have two questions, one for
each of you, both sides of the same coin. I will give them to
you both up front.
Dr. Oneil, I will start with kind of a very abbreviated
story from my own home state of Hawaii, where the indigenous
peoples of Hawaii, the native Hawaiians, lived for generations
and generations in isolation, no contact, a very ecologically
and environmentally balanced and sustainable society.
And then what happened was the first western ships brought
with them rats, and the rats wreaked havoc on the local
wildlife, and also on human beings. Therefore, we imported the
mongoose from India to take care of the rats. Well, the
mongoose started killing off the foul population, and they went
from hero to enemy. So, we brought in something else to take
care of the mongoose, et cetera, et cetera. You can see that
sometimes the best intentions of humans are not as good as what
nature wrote to start with.
And I say that by way of asking you this question. When I
hear your testimony, what I hear you saying is that, hey, we
have a climate change problem, we have incredible risk to our
public lands, to include our forests. And, obviously, that is
creating a number of problems, whether it be wildfires or
whether it be the lack of a natural solution to climate change
and CO2 emissions. But the way to do that is to
harvest the forest. And I just pause on that when I think about
it, from a science perspective, because you are asking me to
really say that my solution to the problem I had in Hawaii was
to introduce another human solution, when the problem was the
rat coming in to start with. The problem was climate change to
start with.
So, I just ask you to comment on--are you saying that the
out, in terms of the impact of climate change on our public
lands, is to enhance harvesting, or is there a human solution?
I am just having--I am not a scientist, I am not a climate
scientist, but I am a skeptic of that position. As opposed to
just going back to a more natural cycle.
I am sorry. And, Dr. Gonzalez, the flip side is, is there a
way to manage our forests that helps climate change?
Dr. Oneil. I think that the challenge is do nothing or log
it to the beach. And that is not actually an alternative that
you would look at, in terms of the national forests, which is
where I have done a lot of this analysis and work. Those are
areas that are available, they are considered timberlands. And
there are a lot of different alternatives of the way that you
would treat those forests to get to a condition that was more
fire resilient.
Like the example that you just explained--I was just in
Hawaii at Christmas, so I got the story of the errors of the
mongoose way--but the idea that if we just leave it to nature
everything would be wonderful would suggest that we haven't
spent 40 or 50 years doing fire suppression and, therefore,
that historic fire return interval would be such that we would
get back to a natural condition. And because we are so far out
of synch, that is not actually possible.
Mr. Case. So, are you saying that we are out of synch
because of human-caused management, and we have to get back
into synch by human ways, as opposed to----
Dr. Oneil. It is a combination of all of those things. It
is a combination of the management decisions that were made in
the last 100 years, including stopping all fires by 10 a.m.
Mr. Case. OK.
Dr. Oneil. And the recognition of that probably--like I
said, for the past 30 or 40 years, fire ecologists are saying
we are going to have a problem, we are going to have a problem.
And now we have a problem.
Mr. Case. OK, I get it. I appreciate your answer. That was
an honest answer.
Dr. Gonzalez, what do you think? Can we handle climate
change in some forest management way to include continued
harvesting? What does that do?
Dr. Gonzalez. Well, published scientific research by my
colleagues at the University of California-Berkeley in Yosemite
National Park and elsewhere shows that prescribed burning and
the use of wildland fire can effectively restore ecosystem
function to our forests, and that it reduces risks of high-
severity fire in the future, improves their resilience to
drought, and improves soil moisture.
Also, fire is more efficient, cost effective, and
environmentally sound than timber harvesting or thinning.
I would underline also that prescribed burning also results
in long-term accumulation of carbon, which naturally reduces
climate change. And the way it does that is you remove the
small trees and the large trees get larger. And over the long
term, the research shows that the large trees will store more
carbon than you release in the short-term burn.
Mr. Case. OK, I am out of time.
So, you are saying, just briefly, yes, there are
appropriate forest management techniques that actually help
climate change?
Dr. Gonzalez. Yes, prescribed burn and wildland fire.
Mr. Case. OK, thank you.
Ms. Haaland. Thank you, Mr. Case. The Chair recognizes Mr.
Bishop.
Mr. Bishop. Thank you.
Dr. Oneil, I appreciate you not speaking in glittering
generalities. But I have 1 minute to ask this question and have
it answered.
Traditionally, forests are thought of as carbon sinks to
suck up carbon. Instead, they are now emitting it. Are there,
in your opinion, some creative ways of forest resiliency that
we could use for these extreme events that we have had? Forty-
one seconds, go for it.
Dr. Oneil. There are a number of examples that are
occurring here. There is an example in Arizona, where they are
looking at forest restoration. They removed the trees, they
have to find a market for them. Unfortunately, there are no
markets to be found.
And part of their requirement is actually to do the fire
risk reduction and get rid of all the biomass before they can
move on to the next area. And I think this is important. When
you harvest, you also have to treat those residues, usually
through some kind of a fire effort.
Now, the challenge is----
Mr. Bishop. I am sorry. Let me go on with this. So, you are
talking about there are practices, but they also have to have
some private-sector economy to make them functional at the same
time?
Dr. Oneil. Absolutely.
Mr. Bishop. All right. Mr. Cole, I appreciate the fact that
you are here when none of your company actually was going to
attend last year. So, thank you for accepting a Democrat
invitation. I think it clearly illustrates how crony capitalism
is working very well in the last administration, and may do it
again in the future.
I have been reading in Matthew about how Christ and John
talked about the hypocrites, except the word ``hypocrite''
comes from a Greek word, which actually is better translated as
a play actor. There are roles people are playing. And I think
we have roles that people are playing here.
Now, the slur against Patagonia is, is Patagonia made in
China? Because that is what all the labels say. I want everyone
to know that is not true. I cleaned out my closet and found a
vest that was purchased from Patagonia, so I looked at the
label. And it was not made in China, it was made in Sri Lanka.
So, the $900 billion industry you are talking about--which
is a slight exaggeration--is basically there to improve the
bottom line, not necessarily improve the planet.
So, for example, the stuff that is made in China by your
company, your company clearly put out the statement that, ``We
made the choice not to disengage with countries on the basis of
their policies.'' I wish you would do that in the United
States, as well.
But amongst those policies which the company now wishes to
ignore is the internment, re-education of over a million Uighur
Muslims; routine jailing of environmental activists and civil
rights campaigners; destroying over 3,000 acres of coral reefs
in the South China Sea with ports and military facilities;
subsidizing long-range commercial fishing fleets that threaten
the viability of fishing around the world; providing $36
billion in financing to developing countries for the
construction of over 102 gigawatts of coal-fired power plants.
In addition, just the Patagonia businesses in China, 65
percent of all those businesses are run on coal. If you had
actually done your work in America, the average in the United
States is only 37 percent, which would be a lot nicer.
Now, in addition to that, the testimony you have given here
has a whole bunch of false narratives in there. If I read the
paragraph you said simply about Bears Ears and Grand Staircase,
but specifically Bears Ears, ``The Administration's actions not
only robbed Native Americans,'' which is false, ``and all
Americans of their natural and cultural heritage,'' false,
``threatened communities that depend on outdoor industries for
economic survival,'' false, ``poison our air and water,''
false, ``wreaked untold damage on vulnerable species,'' false,
``exacerbate climate change,'' false, ``and open up public
lands to more extraction.''
Mr. Curtis, if I can yield to you for a second, you had a
bill to actually legalize the Bears Ears situation and create
it the proper way. Did you open up extraction in the area that
was no longer part of the Bears Ears Monument that was done,
unfortunately, by President Obama in Hawaii?
Mr. Curtis. I regret that, because of the anger in that
area, nobody realized that my bill did more to protect the land
than President Obama's designation. There was a mineral
withdrawal throughout the entire area that President Obama had
designated.
Mr. Bishop. All right. Well, get this in 40 seconds, 50
seconds or less: Did you ban extraction?
Mr. Curtis. Yes.
Mr. Bishop. Why?
Mr. Curtis. It is the right thing to do.
Mr. Bishop. And was there any potential of extraction in
that entire area?
Mr. Curtis. No.
Mr. Bishop. So, that is why we were able to do it.
Actually, the association Patagonia leads was organized to
avoid paying taxes so that you can get the taxpayer to fund all
these programs to exist with your bottom line.
I am pleased that on the tax break that you got, you got
$10 million and you decided to put that into politics. Had you
done that into something actually enhancing the backlog problem
we have in maintenance, that could have been real, and that
could have been something specific, and that could have been
happily there.
Madam Chairman, I have 15 seconds. I want to congratulate
you. You are the only member on your side that has not gone
over the 5-minute limit. In fact, so far, everyone totals 2
minutes and 44 seconds. We should get another speaker on our
side, just to do that. But I appreciate the fact there is a 5-
minute limit. I am quitting.
Ms. Haaland. You are amazing. Thank you very much, Mr.
Bishop.
The Chair now recognizes Mr. Horsford.
Mr. Bishop. For 5 minutes.
Mr. Horsford. Thank you, Madam Chair. And it gives me great
honor to say that, and I am very pleased to be on this
Committee.
Not to belabor the comments that were just made, I would
like to divert back to the interest from my home state of
Nevada, which depends heavily on public lands, and has a long-
standing partnership with government agencies, that we work to
both manage and protect the public lands in partnership
together.
In fact, my district, Nevada's 4th Congressional District,
is home to Great Basin National Park, Death Valley National
Park, Lake Mead National Recreation Area, as well as Gold
Butte, Basin and Range, and Tule Springs National Monument,
something that I am proud to have worked with Ranking Member
Bishop in prior congressional sessions.
Nevada's 4th Congressional District is also home to three
national forests, which span more than 3.5 million acres. In
total, Nevada has more than 59 million acres of public lands.
Eighty-six percent of our state is made up of public land
managed by the Bureau of Land Management, the National Park
Service, the U.S. Forest Service, and other Federal agencies.
Nevada's public lands provide unparalleled outdoor
recreational opportunities for the people of Nevada and the
visitors to our state. In 2017 alone, the National Park Service
accommodated more than 6 million visits to Nevada's parks. And
in 2017, visitors to land managed by the National Park Service
spent more than $250 million supporting 3,281 jobs.
Sadly, due to the impacts of climate change, Nevada's
public lands face an ever-increasing list of threats. In recent
years, rising temperatures have allowed the bark beetle to
multiply faster, putting more forest area at risk of
infestation. Now, the bark beetle may not sound too threatening
to some. But as it continues to infest our forest, it will
substantially increase the forest fires and threaten the health
of Nevada's national forests.
Climate change continues to contribute to longer wildfire
seasons in Nevada. And we have also seen a decline in our water
rates at the Lake Mead National Recreational Area.
All the impacts of climate change increase in scope and
severity. Managers of public lands will continue to face
increased challenges.
Dr. Gonzalez, your research spoke to the disproportional
impacts of climate change on national parks in the Southwest.
And I would like to ask, if you could, if we allow climate
change to continue unabated, what will this mean for districts
like mine?
Dr. Gonzalez. Already in Lake Mead National Recreation
Area, in your district, climate change has combined with
increased water withdrawals from cities and agriculture to
lower the level of the lake to its lowest level since it was
filled in the 1930s. That is in part due to a drought in the
southwestern United States that published research has shown
has been caused by human-caused climate change since 2000, and
is ongoing.
Continued climate change could continue to reduce water
flow in the Colorado River, which threatens the level of the
lake, which not only provides for the ecosystems in the area,
but sustains the people of southern Nevada.
Mr. Horsford. Thank you. And Mr. Cole, can you explain how
the threats outlined by Mr. Gonzalez might impact outdoor
recreation on our public lands?
Mr. Cole. Absolutely. And first off, Nevada is a very
important state for us. We will have upwards of 1,000 employees
as of the end of this year.
Mr. Horsford. We appreciate your contribution to our state
and the creation of those jobs.
Mr. Cole. Thank you, and thanks for your leadership. And
those employees--for a business, we need to attract employees
like that to our locations, to places like our distribution
center in Reno, Nevada. And we can't do that without an
attractive state to bring them into. And part of the
attraction, as you have just noted, about Nevada are its public
lands. It has incredible places for people to come and
recreate, spend time outdoors.
It is an attractive thing for a business like ours. I think
that is the case for businesses across the spectrum in outdoor
recreation, whether it is small mom-and-pop businesses on a
local level that rely on protected places for their business
and to bring people in, or large ones like ours. It was a huge
economic impact, for sure.
Ms. Haaland. Thank you, Mr. Cole.
Thank you, Mr. Horsford. The Chair recognizes Mr. Fulcher.
Mr. Fulcher. Thank you, Madam Chairman and panel, thank you
for being here. I have a question for Dr. Oneil, but I need to
set the stage for that because I think, from what I am hearing,
the situation in our state of Idaho is different than what I am
hearing from my colleagues.
But in our state, approximately two-thirds of our land is
Federal land, so we are really tenants there, instead of
landlords in that sense. And the problem is that our landlord
is about $22 trillion in debt, and they don't have the ability
to manage what is theirs, so they don't.
So, in a given year, we will burn up--just in the forest
areas--about a half-a-million acres, if you want to average it
out over time. And that has kind of turned into a worse-of-all-
worlds scenario, because the wildlife gets decimated in that
circumstance, tons of carbon emissions get kicked up into the
air. We will collectively, state and Federal, spend six-digit
millions in trying to suppress it. But when it is not managed
at all, there is this fuel load that builds up so much that a
lightning strike, boom, hits it and then it is decimated for
our wildlife, our sportsmen, our timber industry, all of that.
So, what is left of our timber industry, what is left of
our sportsmen, our recreationalists, and our farmers, our
ranchers, they would just like to engage in some fashion to try
to put some wisdom--and that is all, just that, just wisdom--
into how that land is managed, the land that is within our
state borders.
From your perspective and your homework, what are the
biggest obstacles and some of the things we might be able to
do, just simply to take the stakeholders who live there, who
want to take care of it, to have a little bit more say in how
that is done?
Dr. Oneil. In Washington State, we have adopted an all-
lands, all-hands approach, where you systematically--looking at
these very high-risk areas, including state, private, and
Federal land, and tribal lands, and looking at how it is that
we could create these large areas that have some resilience in
them. That is sort of a shared stewardship model. They work
very closely with the U.S. Forest Service to try to accomplish
that kind of effort.
But it wouldn't happen without on-the-ground forest
collaboratives. In Washington State, we have a large number of
forest collaboratives that very much speak to that local input
and local outcomes. I would suggest that is a model that is
usable in almost every area. They use it in Arizona, they use
it in Washington State, where they are actually looking at ways
that the local people can get their needs addressed well.
And also public-private relationships because, obviously,
the Forest Service or any other public agency is not in the
business of marketing any kind of material that they remove.
And you do need markets to be able to sustain this stuff. We
have had stewardship contracts for years, and the difficulty is
being able to actually market the material and, therefore,
nobody bids on it, or they don't bid enough to do the work to
actually create this really significant change.
So, it is a systemic challenge, especially if you lose your
infrastructure.
Mr. Fulcher. Thank you, Dr. Oneil.
And Madam Chair, just a closing statement. And I really do
appreciate the perspective of the panelists. And I would just
invite you, if you really believe that fires in their natural
state and just leaving things alone is the best thing to do for
the environment, then I would just encourage you during fire
season, when we are pumping tons of carbon into the air and
spending hundreds of millions to try to suppress it, I would
encourage you just to come visit. We live there. It is our
home. And we just want to take care of it. Thank you.
Ms. Haaland. Thank you, Mr. Fulcher. The Chair now
recognizes Mr. Lowenthal.
Dr. Lowenthal. Thank you, Madam Chair and the witnesses for
being here. I have sat here through this, listening to this,
and I really think it reflects the fact that--later on we are
going to be voting about a package to keep the government open
or not. And we may have some issues later on around the
President thinking about a national emergency. What we are
talking about here is the national emergency that the Nation
confronts, and the planet confronts. So, I am really glad to be
part of this hearing and listen to it.
Yesterday, we held hearings in the Natural Resources
Committee on the Energy and Mineral Resources Subcommittee, and
again, as witnesses have pointed out, 25 percent of our
Nation's energy sources--oil, gas, coal, and then also
renewables--come from Federal lands. That is all the offshore,
all the onshore that are under the control of the Federal
Government, about 25 percent. So, I think that is a great
discussion.
And we have heard from some of the witnesses. I am going to
ask all the witnesses to really answer three questions.
Should we now be placing a moratorium on issuing any new
permits or any new leases for onshore and offshore oil, gas,
and coal? Should we be?
Should we also look at, on existing extraction, to place a
fee or a tax on fossil fuel extraction to fund some of the
impacts of climate change? Should those that are contributing
now, should we be looking at that?
And if we are going to fund some of the impacts, what would
you set up as our priorities from some kind of fee on oil
extraction, or carbon fee, but from Federal lands? How would
you spend, as your highest priority, in terms of some of the
impacts?
I am going to go right across, start with Dr. Gonzalez.
First question, should we place a moratorium on all now new
development on Federal lands?
Dr. Gonzalez. The scientific research clearly shows that we
need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuels. And
moving to renewable, solar, wind, and energy conservation, and
energy efficiency is the way to do that.
Many policy mechanisms to do that, and the one that you
have identified is one of them, it is not in my particular area
of expertise to judge that moratorium, but anything that moves
us away from fossil fuels is good.
Dr. Lowenthal. OK, Dr. Hansen. Should we be placing a
moratorium on all new development, permits, leases?
Dr. Hansen. If our bottom-line goal is to stop making this
problem worse, I would say that would be a prudent course of
action, especially when the injury from the action affects the
very place from which that energy is being extracted.
Dr. Lowenthal. Thank you.
Mr. Cole?
Mr. Cole. Yes, we have already been pretty public in
stating that, for offshore drilling, we believe very firmly the
moratorium should be in place. And similarly, for onshore, I
think it is a prudent action to proceed that way.
Dr. Lowenthal. And Dr. Oneil?
Dr. Oneil. Offshore oil and gas is outside of my realm of
expertise, as a scientist. I am going to decline that one.
Dr. Lowenthal. OK. On existing oil extraction, which is
approximately 25 percent of the Nation's oil, gas, and coal,
should we be having some kind of fee or extraction to really
begin to pay for some of the both short-term and long-term
impacts?
And if it is so, what other kinds of impacts, whether
environmental, whether it is economic development, transitions,
labor, disruptions, if we begin to do this, how should we begin
to use some of the resources?
And anybody can jump in. Because we are going to have to
prioritize.
First of all, should we be--is there a cost to carbon
extraction? And should they be part of the solution by helping
to fund impacts?
Dr. Gonzalez. Again, clearly, the research shows that the
real cost of fossil fuels, the social cost of carbon, has not
been reflected in the price, the environmental impacts and the
social costs. So, any policy that can integrate that real
social cost of carbon into fossil fuel use would be a good
advance.
Dr. Lowenthal. Anybody else? I think I am running out of
time.
Dr. Hansen. I would just like to quickly say that solving
the problem of climate change is addressing the need for fiscal
prudence. The cost of the impacts of climate change is already
upon us. We have already talked about a lot of the effects that
have been seen in everybody's home states.
What that will mean if it continues unchecked for our
economy is catastrophic. Coming up with ways that we create
market incentives to move us away from that and toward the
economy of the future, I think, is vital. I am not an
economist, so I don't know what the best mechanisms are, but we
certainly do need to account for those costs.
Dr. Lowenthal. All right. Thank you, Mr. Chair, and I yield
back.
Mr. Huffman [presiding]. Thank you, Mr. Lowenthal. The
Chair now recognizes the acting Chair. And I allowed a little
extra time there, unlike Ranking Member Bishop, who did a great
job bringing his comments in precisely within the time limit.
However, I think he may have exceeded the limit of
reasonable credibility with some of that anger and sanctimony
directed at Patagonia. It seems that all of this anger and
passion about doing business with China and other countries for
clothing is reserved for companies that want to protect public
lands and national monuments, and do something about climate
change and be good corporate citizens.
I wish we had more even-handed sanctimony that applied to
the Trump family. After all, these are the biggest hypocrites
of all. They attend their MAGA rallies, they whip people into a
nationalist fervor, railing against doing business and trade
with China, and then they turn around and do exactly that. So,
I hope we cannot only honor time limits, but also honor even-
handedness in our sanctimony, as we go forward.
I was pleased by the other side's calling a witness to this
hearing--the first time, I believe, in any of our Natural
Resource Subcommittee hearings--Dr. Oneil, who firmly reflects
the mainstream of the global scientific community in
acknowledging climate change. I am getting a little whiplash,
because we have heard previous witnesses that tell us no big
deal, nothing to see here.
But Dr. Oneil, I found your testimony refreshing and
welcome. The only piece that I wanted to push back on a little
is the notion that we might be able to log ourselves out of
this problem, or log ourselves even to fire resilience. I
represent a lot of forestland and a lot of public land that has
much in common with some of my Republican colleagues. And I am
glad you clarified a little bit that you are not talking about
logging all the way to the beach, so I appreciate that comment
very much that you made.
But I think it is important to acknowledge--because I live
this reality, too--that the 2017 North Bay Fires and last
year's Mendocino Complex Fire, which devastated parts of my
district, burned primarily in chaparral. These were not large-
standing merchantable trees. Sixty percent of wildfires occur
on chaparral and grasslands, so they are not going to be
stopped by logging, they are not going to be stopped even by
many conventional fuels reduction projects. And these fires
also are exceptional because of weather events: high winds, dry
ground, all of these factors, not simply this simplistic notion
that we don't cut enough trees.
That is why many of us want to prioritize mitigation
projects in and around at-risk communities, ensuring that those
communities have the resources and guidance that they need to
establish fire-safe neighborhoods. That is smart fire
resiliency.
But you might be surprised, Dr. Oneil. I think if you and I
sat in a room, we would agree on a lot of things where we can
do more cutting of trees and more harvesting. And we can do it
thoughtfully, with shaded fuel breaks. We can do thinning of
some of these second and third-growth plantation stands that
are extreme risks for catastrophic fires.
So, I don't want to suggest that we are totally on opposite
pages, or that the choice is to discontinue all harvesting and
just open the doors to unlimited harvesting with impunity. I
think there is a lot of common ground that we can work on
together.
Now, Dr. Gonzalez, we have heard at length about logging to
reduce fuel loads, and I want to ask you. Does the best
available science suggest that commercial logging in this
fashion is a silver bullet to reduce fire risk?
Dr. Gonzalez. Published scientific research shows the
opposite. It is that pre-emptively using fire management,
prescribed burning, and wildland fire is the way to restore
ecosystem integrity to our forests, and to reduce high-severity
fire in the future.
Mr. Huffman. OK. Mr. Cole, I know Patagonia is based in
Ventura, close to where the devastating Thomas Fire burned
hundreds of thousands of acres around Ventura. Was this the
fire in an unthinned tree stand?
Mr. Cole. No, those fires which did impact us heavily--we
had over half of our employees evacuated at given times over
the past couple of years--that was in exactly the kind of
habitat you described, which is chaparral. It is coastal scrub.
A policy to log more would not have helped that area at
all.
Mr. Huffman. OK. Moving to a different subject, we have
talked a lot about our public lands being a great asset for
this country, and a contributor to emissions. But they can also
be part of the solution through carbon sequestration, soil
health, and other factors. Can you speak very briefly about
regenerative agriculture, and healthy soils on our public
lands, as a strategy to reduce emissions?
Mr. Cole. Yes, this is another sort of pillar of our policy
and approach around addressing the climate crisis, is
regenerative organic agriculture. The concept is one that goes
back, literally, thousands of years. It is a sort of low-till,
no-till crop rotation orientation to agriculture that has huge
benefits in storing carbon in the soil. And we know that simply
cutting back on fossil fuels and shifting to renewables is not
enough. We have to store carbon.
Mr. Huffman. Thank you----
Mr. Cole. So, this is a great approach----
Mr. Huffman. I apologize that I don't have more time,
because we deserve to have a longer conversation about that
subject, but we are out of time.
Mr. Westerman.
Mr. Westerman. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, I appreciate----
Mr. Huffman. I think we have reached the end.
Mr. Westerman. Yes, OK, I thought we were doing a second
round.
Mr. Huffman. Are we going to do a second round? Oh, the
Chair is here.
Mr. Westerman. We still have time on the clock.
Mr. Huffman. I am happy to--let me leave that tough
decision to the Chair, though.
Ms. Haaland [presiding]. Thank you so much. I wanted to go
until noon. We have 10 minutes. So, we have time for two more
questions, one on your side and one on ours. How is that? If
you would like to go over your time, I am more than happy to
accommodate you. Thank you.
Mr. Westerman. We are burning them now.
Ms. Haaland. Exactly. Mr. Westerman.
Mr. Westerman. Thank you, Madam Chair. I appreciate you
doing a second round. I think southerners should be given more
minutes. I think we are being discriminated against because of
our slow cadence in speaking, but we will try to get more
questions in this time.
I would like to make a bit of a clarification. I think we
have to distinguish between public lands and Federal lands. We
have the national parks and we have the Forest Service, which I
think are two land bases that should be managed differently.
Dr. Gonzalez, I know you talked about Yellowstone. I got to
spend some time in Yellowstone. I never realized before going
out there just how much of a lodgepole pine cohort is in
Yellowstone, which we know has about a 100-year life
expectancy, until you get a stand-replacing fire. I think the
one in the 1980s took out about half of Yellowstone. It is
going to burn. I don't think we need to manage on Yellowstone,
we can let nature manage Yellowstone. That is what has been
going on there. And there are other places on our national
parks where I have never promoted doing intensive management on
those parks. There could be stuff in the wildland-urban
interface.
But the Forest Service is a different story. And I would
like to just go back briefly to my previous testimony, where I
had the chart up that showed that active management plus using
wood materials, overall, is a bigger carbon synch, better for
the environment than just a hands-off approach to management.
And I want to ask the scientist this.
Dr. Gonzalez, do you agree with that assessment, that
management plus using wood materials is better than non-
management?
Dr. Gonzalez. Prescribed burning, again, has been shown to
increase carbon storage in forests more than mechanical
thinning.
Mr. Westerman. Dr.----
Mr. Huffman. Could I ask if Mr. Westerman would yield just
for a clarification of his question? And I will give you all of
my time, as far as----
Mr. Westerman. I will yield to the gentleman.
Mr. Huffman. I am just wondering if you are asking
categorically, across the board. Because sometimes we talk as
if all forests and all fires are the same, and they are just--
--
Mr. Westerman. No, I am not talking across the board.
Mr. Huffman. OK.
Mr. Westerman. But in areas where we can actively manage,
where we produce wood products, we build wood buildings, build
furniture, the research shows that that, overall, is better for
the environment than no management at all. And I am just asking
if you agree with that research, or do you disagree with it.
Dr. Gonzalez. Storage and harvested wood products can, yes,
increase carbon storage. But the point I was making was the
difference between prescribed burning, proactive fire
management, versus logging and thinning. And it is the
proactive fire management that has been shown----
Mr. Westerman. I need to move on. Dr. Hansen?
Dr. Hansen. My area of expertise is not forest dynamics.
However, what I do know is that if, in fact, you want to have
forest products in order to be harvested, we need to start
managing our forest systems for future conditions. Otherwise,
we will end up with not----
Mr. Westerman. Agreed, that the adaptive management----
Dr. Hansen. We need to undertake adaptation principles,
yes.
Mr. Westerman. And Dr. Oneil?
Dr. Oneil. I have worked extensively in this area. In fact,
some of the published research quantifies those differences in
just leaving the forests alone or managing it for wood products
to both store the carbon in the wood and offset the use of
other materials like steel and concrete. So, yes, I do agree
with that.
Mr. Westerman. OK. And Madam Chair, I would like to submit
for the record the charts that I have put up that were so hard
to read. They did come from this graduate-level textbook called
Global Resources and the Environment, by Chad Oliver, who is a
professor at Yale University. I would like to submit those for
the record, that show that managing forests and using wood
products are better for the environment.
Ms. Haaland. Without objection, so ordered.
Mr. Westerman. Thank you.
Dr. Oneil, you also supplied this chart that shows forests
on the Federal lands have a higher mortality rate than a growth
rate, which is very concerning.
Contrary to that, in my state of Arkansas we produce 16
million more tons of wood per year every year. And with your
data of 50 percent of that is carbon, we are actually synching
8 million more tons of carbon per year in the state of
Arkansas. The state of Georgia, it is 9\1/2\ million tons of
carbon more per year that is going into synch.
Should states like Arkansas, who have a healthy forest, be
rewarded for that, versus states who have--or the Federal
Government, that have forests that have higher mortality and
are emitting more carbon, storing less carbon? Should they be
punished?
Dr. Oneil. I am not into the punishment and reward thing
here.
Mr. Westerman. Well, maybe that wasn't the right word.
Should there be more incentives for states like Arkansas, that
are sequestering more carbon?
Dr. Oneil. I think the incentive is to promote and support
a sector, for a sector that will encourage that investment in
growing forests and using them for harvested wood products, and
then using those harvested wood products, as many of them as
possible and long-lived products.
Certainly in the Southeast we have a really vibrant forest
industry. And actually, that same report that looked at the
national forests and the level of mortality also speaks to the
fact that in the southeast United States there are more acres
under management, and they are harvesting more than they ever
have, but yet they are carrying more than they ever had because
there is investment, because there is a market. And that market
promotes the reinvestment in forestry.
We also see that in the Pacific Northwest in the coastal
areas, where you have a lot of private forestland, and the
investment supports the idea of continued forest management.
When we lose that market, we lose the investment potential,
we lose the potential to use those lands to sequester carbon
and then produce wood products. It is a different calculus.
Ms. Haaland. Thank you, Dr. Oneil.
Thank you, Mr. Westerman. And I would like to make note
that we did yield to your southern cadence, so thank you for
bringing that up.
Mr. Huffman. Madam Chair, would you please deduct Mr.
Westerman's extra time from mine? And I will yield back.
[Laughter.]
Ms. Haaland. Thank you. I will ask the last question of
this hearing, and my question goes to Dr. Hansen. The first is
a yes-no question, the second one I will ask you to expand on
the answer.
In your testimony, you mentioned that we need to provide
our agencies with clear, informed mandates to begin preparing
for climate change. In your opinion, has this Administration
provided these?
Dr. Hansen. No.
Ms. Haaland. And what should we be requiring our agencies
to do?
Dr. Hansen. It should be a required part of how they do
business. And I am going to preface this by saying this isn't
just because of environmental interests. This should also be an
interest by every taxpayer in this country.
We should not be allowing decisions to be made that are not
going to be effective for what we want our government to be
doing for us, because they will be undermined by the effects of
climate change. So, the need would be for all decisions made,
all actions taken by Federal agencies to be evaluated for their
vulnerability to climate change, and designed to maximize the
reduction of that risk so that we can deliver on the promises
that we are making to the American people, to future
generations, and to the environment that we are stewards of.
Ms. Haaland. Thank you very much, Dr. Hansen. And that
concludes our hearing on this climate change and public lands.
I want to thank you all again for being here today, and for
helping us start this important conversation. It is imperative
that we hear the best science, and that we understand the
impacts so that we can begin to act on climate change.
Unfortunately, our colleagues across the aisle have chosen
to focus on land use scenarios and outdated rhetoric, but these
claims will not slow us down.
To our witnesses, your insights and policy recommendations
have been helpful, and will help us craft bold and impactful
legislation around climate change adaptation. Let us not forget
how momentous it is that we are once again hosting these
important conversations in the halls of Congress.
And this is the end of the hearing.
That is right. The members of the Committee may have some
additional questions for the witnesses, and we will ask you to
respond to these in writing.
Under Committee Rule 3(o), members of the Committee must
submit witness questions within 3 business days following the
hearing, and the hearing record will be held open for 10
business days for these responses.
If there is no further business, without objection, the
Committee stands adjourned.
[Whereupon, at 12 p.m., the Subcommittee was adjourned.]
[ADDITIONAL MATERIALS SUBMITTED FOR THE RECORD]
Prepared Statement of the Hon. Debbie Dingell, a Representative in
Congress from the State of Michigan
Thank you, Chairman Haaland and Ranking Member Young, for convening
this hearing to discuss the threat of climate change and the unique
challenges it poses to our Nation's public lands.
Public lands are key to the economic and ecological health of
Michigan. As they comprise almost 10 percent of Michigan's total land
area, these areas drive tens of millions of dollars in tourism and
support thousands of jobs.
From the iconic Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore to Isle
Royale National Park, these areas are fundamental to Michigan's
identity and the state's outdoor recreation economy.
Given the integral role that public lands play in Michigan, I am
highly concerned about the effects of climate change that these areas
face. We know that public lands will face disproportionate impacts as a
result of climate change.
Over the last century, the mean annual temperature experienced
across the United States' national park system increased at double the
rate of the United States as a whole.
As a result of reduced winter ice and snow cover caused by climate
change, the Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore will face
accelerated loss from increased erosion. Additionally, other national
parks both in Michigan and across the United States face potentially
existential risks.
The need for action is clear--we must work to address climate
change without delay by taking strong and decisive action at the
Federal level.
Protections for public lands are critical for not only mitigating
the impact of climate change on sensitive ecosystems, but also,
properly managed, can serve as a climate adaption solution.
Unfortunately, the Trump administration has elected to ignore the
numerous economic, public health, and ecological benefits that public
land preservation provides. Instead, they have prioritized oil
drilling, mining and resource extraction at all costs.
The Administration's actions include rescinding Department of the
Interior guidance to prepare for the impacts of climate change on
public lands, as well as unprecedented actions to put public lands in
private hands.
These actions are highly misguided. Instead, we should be renewing
our commitment to preserving America's public lands for future
generations.
It is my hope that today's witnesses will provide context on the
importance of public land protections in addressing climate change, and
the key role that they will play as we examine solutions to this
pressing issue.
______
Dr. Mark E. Harmon, Professor Emeritus, Oregon State University
Statement Submitted for the Record Concerning Committee Hearing dated
February 13, 2019 on Climate Change and Public Lands: Examining Impacts
and Considering Adaptation Opportunities
My name is Dr. Mark E. Harmon and I am currently a professor
emeritus at Oregon State University. I wish to offer the Subcommittee
my personal comments and opinions on the issue you are considering.
These are based on my 33 years of professional experience examining
these and related issues. Over my career I have received a large number
of grants (78 in total), published numerous peer-reviewed journal
articles (over 140), been an author of three major reviews (one cited
over 3,900 times), reviewed about 175 research proposals for agencies
such as NASA, NSF, and USDA, served as a referee on many scientific
manuscripts (over 450 for a total of 100 different journals), taught
several graduate level courses on the topic of forest ecosystems and
forest carbon dynamics and well as made dozens of scientific and
outreach presentations on these topics, and served as a scientific
expert to Oregon's and Federal agencies including the US EPA (biogenic
carbon). To give more details I am providing my abbreviated curriculum
vitae, but I believe most scientists in this field would consider me a
leading expert particularly in the field of forest carbon.
I have a general concern about both the written and transcribed
testimony from Dr. Oneil (the Minority witness) that I have recently
read regarding the examination of climate change impacts on public
lands and adaptation opportunities. To sum up the basic logic that
appears to have been presented: (1) a warming climate coupled with
increased tree density has lead increased disturbance caused by fire,
insects, and disease in forests; (2) therefore more trees must be
harvested to reduce tree density; (3) these management actions will
reduce the amount of disturbance; and (4) will result in greater stores
of carbon thus reducing one of the key drivers of climate change,
atmospheric carbon dioxide. I find this analysis to be overly
simplified, lacking context, and incomplete as it leaves out many key
concepts that need to be part of any practical and credible solution.
In the following sections I elaborate.
selecting a management solution
The choice presented in the testimony seemed to have been that one
can either let nature take its course or institute management involving
deliberate campaign of widespread tree harvesting. I believe that is a
false choice that does not reflect the diversity of forest management
objectives present in the United States, nor does it reflect the range
of forest conditions and responses; nor does it reflect the practical
and economic limitations that will undoubtedly shape management
choices. One can envision a wide diversity of potentially effective
management options that go far beyond what was offered:
In some remote wilderness/park/reserve areas the best choice
might be to allow nature take its course given lack of access,
expense, and management objectives (which might include
allowing nature to dominate);
In other such areas it might make sense to reintroduce
disturbances such as fires to achieve objectives;
In yet other areas it might make sense to suppress fires
aggressively under certain weather conditions, but not others;
In the interfaces between forests and human communities it
might make sense to not only reduce tree density, but to remove
trees altogether.
This not an exhaustive list, but the point is that the management
solution must match the specific management objectives, have a strong
chance of achieving the objectives, and be realistic regarding economic
and logistical limitations. Using forest harvest such as thinning in
all situations would mean roads would have to be built into parks and
wilderness areas often at extreme financial and environmental cost, but
it would also mean that areas where complete tree removal is needed,
such as for fire breaks and defensible spaces, would not be managed
appropriately either. In plain terms we need to match specific
solutions to specific conditions, not find a general problem to impose
the single solution that we desire to implement.
In deciding which management actions to take, the primary objective
of management for a particular forest needs to be recognized. Despite
studying forest carbon for decades, I do not believe that carbon
sequestration is the primary reason why most forests are managed today.
While certainly important, carbon is a secondary objective/concern that
should be managed to maximize stores (in the forest, in products, and
substitutions) within the constraints of the primary management
objective. One of my concerns with the testimony I read is that it
seems to suggest that management actions will be taken to increase
carbon stores and that other benefits such as economic, housing, energy
benefits will follow. I would encourage everyone to stop dropping ``the
carbon bomb'' to convince others of the validity of their desired
management objective. There is a wide range of valid forest management
objectives that have little to do with carbon. A more productive
pathway would involve accepting the wide range of forest management
objectives that exist and within those consider how carbon can be
managed effectively.
mortality considered
Increased mortality beyond the historic range of this process is a
concern, and I have no doubt some aspects of these changes need to be
managed and mitigated through adaptation. However, it is overly
simplistic and counterproductive to imply that mortality is always
undesirable or that it automatically degrades forest ecosystem
function. Mortality has always occurred in forests and that is why
there are numerous species of animals, plants, and fungi that have
evolved to take advantage of dead trees. Moreover, mortality is how
forests thin themselves and coupled with decomposition is how forests
recycle the nutrients they need to grow. Preventing mortality in
forests or removing dead trees, as in the very intensive management
best seen in 1980s northern Europe, has reduced the abundance of many
species by removing their habitat and limiting the structural
development/diversification of forests. That is why current forest
management in many parts of northern Europe is trying to restore dead
tree habitat. It should be noted that mortality does not equate with
the loss of carbon or any other general function of forest ecosystems.
The concept that carbon is completely lost or habitat is completely
lost because of mortality is mistaken at best. When trees die in a
forest from natural causes, a substantial part of the carbon remains
(even in the case of severe fires more than 90 percent remains) and
this carbon is gradually lost through the process of decomposition
(which takes decades to centuries). While live tree habitat is lost
during mortality, dead tree habitat is gained. What occurs in mortality
is that the form of carbon and type of habitat changes. The only known
process to immediately remove live and/or dead tree carbon and habitat
at a large scale from a forest is timber harvest. We know this because
trees, at least the aboveground part, are deliberately removed from the
forest in a harvest!
Mortality is a natural process and ranges from the death of
scattered individual trees to small patches of trees all the way up to
major episodes covering broad areas. These forms of mortality have
occurred in forests as long as forests have existed. None of these
scales is more natural than another and over a broad area about as many
trees die as scattered individuals as in major episodes. In and of
itself these forms of mortality are not cause for concern. What is a
concern is the degree that these forms of mortality change forests in
ways that prevent specific management objectives from being achieved.
This means that we cannot assume that the level of mortality tolerated
in an intensively managed forest (very little) is the same as expected
in a wilderness area where the creation of open habitats might be an
important management objective (a great deal).
If maintaining forests is the management objective, then widespread
mortality coupled with low tree regeneration success is the key
concern, not mortality on its own. Mortality need not lead to a
permanent loss of desired forest conditions, especially when a
disturbed forest retains and regenerates the elements needed to restore
these conditions. In many cases, disturbance-related mortality is a
temporary reorganizer of forests and there are natural processes that
allow forests to ``recover'' the conditions that are desired. The
recovery process can begin quickly (years) or slowly (decades), but one
must bear in mind that the perceived speed of successful recovery is
strongly influenced by management objectives: 5 years may be too long
for tree regeneration in a short rotation production forest, but 50
years or more may be appropriate in a remote wilderness. If management
actions such as seeding and planting are needed to speed forest
regeneration, then these actions need to be targeted to specific
locations and situations as they may be neither needed (moist soils)
nor effective (persistently very dry soils) in all locations. Moreover,
if regeneration is assisted, the approach should be to introduce a wide
range of genetic stock and species to cover the possible spectrum of
future conditions. This acknowledges our uncertainty in predicting
future conditions and increases changes of success because it allows
natural processes to find the most successful ``players'' in the future
forest.
To understand how to solve a problem one must understand what the
problem is. Much was made in the testimony of the observation that
mortality has increased fourfold in National Forest timberlands over
the 1976-2016 period. While the data support this observation, it is
misleading if taken at face value. The implication is that if mortality
has increased fourfold, it must be solely due to increases in
disturbance. This is misleading because, as noted above, about half of
all tree mortality occurs at the individual level (which is not
generally considered a disturbance), but also because mortality as it
was expressed (that is a volume dying per year) depends on two items:
(1) the proportion dying each year and (2) the volume of trees that can
potentially die. Mortality can increase if either term increases. As
Figure 1 in Dr. Oneil's written statement makes clear, net growth (the
amount forest live volume/biomass/carbon increases) has been positive
throughout the 1952-2016 period. This means, despite the occurrence of
mortality, that live tree volume has increased over this time period.
Based on the values presented in Dr. Oneil's testimony I estimate that
tree volume may have roughly doubled over this period.\1\ Thus, one
would expect half of the fourfold mortality increase evoking concern to
have been caused simply by the fact that today's forest has
substantially more volume than earlier forests. By analogy if one plans
to buy a house at 4 percent annual mortgage interest then do not be
surprised if the $100,000 house has one-half the interest payment of
the $200,000 house. This not to say that there has not been an increase
in the proportion of tree volume dying. Using the mortality rate
reported by Dr. Oneil, it does appear that the proportion of tree
volume dying has increased by about a factor of two between 1972 and
2016 with much of this increase occurring in the past two decades.
However, in addition to knowing what level of reduction is required one
must also understand the specific mechanisms behind the changes: one
has to ask why the proportion of tree volume dying has increased. The
suggestion in the testimony seems to be that it is related to fire and
bark beetles; while I suspect this is partially true and there is
evidence to support this hypothesis, there are other substantial
sources of tree mortality that have increased over this period such as
those related to wind and invasive species that are not related to
either tree density or drought. Therefore, it is hard to envision how
forest thinning, the proposed solution to reducing fires, disease, and
insect attacks, would decrease the impact of wind disturbance, or that
related to invasive insects such as the woolly adelgids attacking
eastern hemlocks and Fraser fir or the emerald ash borer attacking
green ash much less diseases such as sudden oak death. In fact, in some
cases thinning might exacerbate these forms of mortality.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
\1\ Unfortunately the data used in this figure is not publicly
available as far as I could determine and a full citation was not
provided limiting my ability to find it. I have no doubt that the data
presented are relatively accurate, however, without knowing the
starting volume it is difficult to precisely estimate the degree volume
has increased in a relative sense. The data presented suggest that
cubic volume has increased by 212,150 million cubic feet over the 1952-
2016 period. However, we know that cubic volume was not zero in 1952.
Based on the likely fraction of live tree volume dying in 1952-1976,
something in the range of 0.3-0.6 percent per year, it is likely the
volume in 1952 was in the range of 250,000 cubic feet. If provided the
1952 volume from this dataset I could easily make a more precise
estimate of the relative increase in live tree volume between 1952 and
2016.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
While an increase in the proportion of trees dying each year is of
concern, the idea that the proportion of gross growth (NPP) allocated
to mortality is indicative of a problem is misguided. Specifically,
concern was expressed that two-thirds of gross growth (equivalent to
net primary production or NPP) is currently being ``lost'' to
mortality. The suggestion is that this ``large'' proportion is
unnatural, but that ignores the fact that, absent harvests (which are
after all forms of human induced mortality), forests allocate gross
growth (NPP) into either net growth or mortality and this allocation
changes as forests age. In young forests the majority of gross growth
is allocated toward net growth (leading to a rapid increase in volume)
and in older forests an increasing share of gross growth (up to 100
percent) is allocated toward mortality. This change is why forest
volume does not increase forever and tends to saturate as forests age.
This is a fundamental relationship found in all forests, documented in
the forestry literature for more than a century, and is observed even
those in management systems in which harvest mortality replaces natural
mortality as a source of live tree removal. In fact when a sustainable
harvest system is implemented, the expectation is that harvest and
mortality comprise 100 percent of gross growth, hence the volume over a
large area remains constant. As a specific example of how the
allocation of mortality changes as forest age, we can examine the case
when tree maximum life span is about 500 years. For this kind of
forest, mortality would comprise 63 percent of the gross growth of an
even-aged stand at about 100 years. In a stand that is 200 years of age
one would anticipate that mortality would comprise 85 percent of gross
growth and for a stand of 300 years age mortality would comprise 95
percent. Returning to the National Forest timberlands data we find that
between 1952 and 2019 all forms of mortality (harvest included) have
increased as a share of gross growth from 53 to 69 percent. But much of
this is related to the fact that these forests have become older, a
fact consistent with the observed twofold increase in volume over this
period. The only alternative explanation for increased live mass is
that National Forest timberland acreages have increased twofold,
whereas we know these acreages have remained relatively constant.
where and when is high tree density a problem?
The idea that high tree density (that is number of stems) is the
primary cause of recent unnatural mortality levels is overly
simplistic. This is because it ignores the natural variation in space
and time that one expects of tree density. In closed forest ecosystems,
tree density is highest once forest stands have regenerated. As trees
grow and start to compete for resources, mortality is expected to
increase. Harvest thinning in these forests is a way to mimic and
control this expected natural mortality process.
While some forests have higher tree density because of management
actions such as fire suppression, others have climates and reproductive
strategies that lead to high tree density. Those most influenced by
fire suppression in the West include ponderosa pine and mixed conifer
types where tree density has greatly increased over the period of fire
suppression. One could argue that harvest thinning in these types would
be appropriate. However, in many other forest types tree density is
naturally high and is unlikely the direct cause of recent widespread
mortality. A prime example would be the recent massive beetle-kill in
lodgepole pine forests. The cause of these outbreaks was not high tree
density. Tree densities in these types are naturally very high because
of this species' reproductive strategy and tree densities in these
forests have not noticeably increased substantially due to fire
suppression. Rather, warmer conditions allowed bark beetle populations
to increase and coupled with a long-term drought widespread mortality
occurred. Ironically, the lodgepole pine stands least susceptible to
beetle-kill were those with small diameter and high tree density, the
conditions where drought conditions should have had the highest impact
due to high levels of competition. The ecology of these species tells
us why: this beetle species cannot reproduce when bark falls below a
certain thickness and adult beetles will not attack trees if the
beetles cannot reproduce within them, regardless of the tree's drought
stress. It is therefore important to apply basic ecological knowledge
in developing an effective solution and not impose a one-size-fits-all
solution unrelated to addressing actual mechanisms.
effective management solutions with a responsive system
While it tempting to assume that once a management treatment is
imposed from ``above'' that the problem is solved, this is a mistake
when applied to forests.\2\ This is because forests do not stay the way
one leaves them, and they often respond in ways that counter treatment
objectives. Perhaps the best example of this is fire suppression and
its effects on fuels: suppressing fires initially leads to a decrease
in fire impacts, but as fuels increase (because of the lack of fire)
the impacts (at least in some forests) eventually increase. A similar
response behavior is quite possible for the management actions being
proposed. Specifically, reducing tree density or carbon in the form of
fuel is a temporary solution because, unless the underlying controls
are changed, forests will respond to these actions by increasing tree
density and carbon. Hence, the solution will have to be repeated
frequently raising long-term logistical, environmental, and economic
concerns. This repeated treatment also leads to permanent carbon debts:
if high fuel/carbon level is the cause of undesired levels of
disturbance, then to solve the problem one must reduce fuel/carbon
permanently, hence a carbon permanent debt develops. I should add that
the argument that carbon debts cannot occur in forests because forests
are renewable resources is completely erroneous: if high fuel/carbon is
causing a problem then why would be want this high level to renew?
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
\2\ A mistake that I might add which has been repeated to the
degree that an alternative to top down control management approaches
has recently been developed.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Even if the goal of reducing tree density is permanently achieved,
forests may react in ways that counter the expected goal. Suppose the
goal is to greatly reduce the occurrence of crown fires; then tree
density would have to be greatly reduced because average tree distance
has to be increased beyond that needed to spread these types of fires.
This degree of opening in turn would allow smaller forms of vegetation
(fine fuels associated with fire spread) to greatly increase and these
openings would also greatly increase the rate of fuel drying. So while
crown fires might be reduced, fires would continue to be widespread and
challenge control efforts. In other words, one would replace one
problem with a slightly different one.
To avoid these problems, one cannot think of forests as static
systems that do what they are ``told.'' Instead forests are adaptive,
responsive systems than need to be persistently ``persuaded'' to move
in the directions consistent with our management objectives.
the fate of harvested trees
In the testimony harvest removal is viewed as not only solving the
problem, but having major benefits in terms of goods and economic gain
as well as major carbon benefits that would exceed carbon losses
incurred in the forest. The carbon benefits would come in two forms:
(1) carbon stores related to forest products and (2) substitutions that
would reduce the use of fossil carbon. While there is an element of
truth to these statements, they are misleading if accepted at face
value.
Let us consider the statement that harvested carbon is stored in
products. A more accurate statement would be that some harvested carbon
is stored in products for some time. Although these sound similar, they
are profoundly different in their effects. Specifically, when carbon is
removed from forests through harvest, not all of the carbon ends up as
solid products. If the harvested carbon is used for lumber/plywood/OSB
production then somewhere between 30-40 percent is lost to the
atmosphere in the manufacturing process. If the harvested carbon is
used to make paper, then the amount lost to the atmosphere is around 50
percent and if used as fuel then it is 100 percent. Contrast these
amounts to the range of live carbon lost to the atmosphere during
natural disturbances: somewhere between zero and 10 percent. Moreover,
consider the fact that wood products have varying life spans in use and
after they are disposed, that these time frames can be quite short, and
are roughly comparable to those found for wood decomposing naturally.
While is it often assumed that the carbon related to mortality is lost
to the atmosphere, that process can take 3 to 50 decades to complete.
Taken together, the initial losses in manufacture and the losses in use
and disposal means that removing carbon by harvest have roughly the
same carbon storages effects as leaving the wood in the forest to
decompose. Granted harvesting produces items that humans can use and
generates wealth, but that should not be conflated with carbon effects.
Perhaps the biggest misconception is that using harvested wood will
lead to large amounts of fossil carbon not being used through the
process of substitution. While this is theoretically possible, there
are several considerations that must be acknowledged to determine the
degree this actually will happen. For example, in the case of product
substitution (that is substituting wood for concrete and steel in
construction), the preferences for materials has to be considered. In
North America wood is the preferred material for residential homes,
with about a 95 percent preference for wood. That would mean that one
could try to replace the 5 percent of buildings not utilizing wood and
gain a substitution benefit, but it is not possible to substitute wood
for wood and gain a substitution benefit for the other 95 percent. The
situation for taller buildings would differ as concrete and steel are
currently preferred, but this raises a different problem: to build
taller buildings using wood one need to engineer laminated materials, a
process that involves more energy. It is highly unlikely that concrete
and steel manufacturers will increase their fossil carbon use to keep
the product-related displacement factor the same. Hence, it is possible
that amount of fossil carbon displaced by wood use could decrease
substantially in the case of taller buildings. Finally, for both
substitutions related to products and energy one must recognize that
the fossil carbon not used by the building sector today will likely be
used by other sectors in the future. Consider the estimates of the
times that fossil fuel carbon is likely to be depleted: 50-250 years
depending on the form of fossil carbon. Unless this substitution-
related carbon is protected by some actual mechanism, the assumption
that unused fossil carbon today will never be used in the future is
completely naive. Taken together it is highly likely that actual
substitution benefits will be far lower than most expect and, in some
cases, will not fully counter carbon losses related to forest harvest.
a strategy that acknowledges odds of success and failure
As described in the testimony, the suggested management treatments
appear to assure complete success. Conversely, the path of allowing
nature to take its course appears to assure complete failure. That may
be, but this view seems overly deterministic given the system we are
actually dealing with: critical conditions such as drought and
temperature that vary greatly from place to place, season to season and
year to year; different historical pathways creating varying forest
structures that react to climate and other stressors in different ways;
and species that not only have different characteristics, but that do
not interact in consistent ways.\3\ In other words, the system we have
to deal with is not deterministic, it is highly stochastic (seemingly
random). Like it or not, we are forced to play games of chance in our
management.
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\3\ The case of bark beetles illustrates this point. When bark
beetle populations are low, many of these species attack recently
killed trees, but not living ones. When bark beetle populations are
high many species attack weakened living trees, and when very high they
attack even vigorously growing trees. This behavior is related to the
ability to mass attack trees which is in turn a function of the
beetles' population size.
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There are several ways to increase the odds of success when playing
games of chance including: (1) know the rules and the possibilities,
(2) understand the odds regarding outcomes, (3) use a range of
strategies, (4) recognize that while there is a chance of winning,
there is also a chance of losing, and (5) decide where and when it is
best to not play at all. This general strategy is applied to everything
from poker to investments to medicine. I am not sure why we would not
apply it to climate change adaptation.
summary
I believe that it is a mistake to apply a single solution (such as
more tree harvest) to a problem with the complexity of forest
adaptation to climate change. A more appropriate and productive
approach would be the development of a broad strategy that considers
the likelihood of climate change-related phenomena modifying forests in
ways that do not meet the very wide range of management objectives
related to forests. To work, this strategy would have to be applied a
local level given the wide variation at multiple scales from landscapes
to regions to the Nation in terms of management objectives as well as
the conditions present in forests. Moreover, it would have to assess
the range of negative responses possible, their magnitude, and
likelihood so that efforts can be prioritized. Management solutions
would have to be tied to the actual mechanisms causing the undesired
changes and the possible negative side effects (environmental,
economic, ecosystem) and potential countervailing processes would have
to be considered to evaluate the chances of success once the solution
is implemented. Finally, given the inherently stochastic nature of this
problem it would make sense to use a diversity of approaches (even at
the local scale) until more information can be gathered as to the most
effective and efficient solutions.
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[LIST OF DOCUMENTS SUBMITTED FOR THE RECORD RETAINED IN THE COMMITTEE'S
OFFICIAL FILES]
Submission for the Record by Rep. Westerman
-- Two graphs from Global Resources and the Environment,
published by Cambridge University Press.
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