Should WA’s foresters harvest timber or sell it for carbon credits?

Legacy forests

What sets Washington apart from neighbors like Oregon is its higher proportion of state-owned lands compared to federal lands. This allows for more localized control and tailored strategies, like the Carbon Project, which the Department of Natural Resources introduced in 2022. The project introduced a new way for Washington to generate revenue from public land through carbon sequestration projects, in which developers manage forests to capture carbon and sell credits to offset emissions. 

Under the direction of the commissioner, parcels of legacy forests old enough for harvesting were identified and set aside. The definition of “legacy forests” varies among stakeholders, but it most often refers to trees that are younger than old growth but have been steadily maturing since World War II.  

However, because the project has no formal legal designation, this decision is not binding; a future Commissioner could reverse it, open forests for harvest or repurpose them for other uses — especially since no projects have yet been launched.

“At this point, everything is just on pause,” said the Department’s policy director Csenka Favorini-Csorba. “We are still doing work on our side to explore potential possibilities, so it’s not dead, but project developers are not chomping at the bit to get involved.” 

The Carbon Project has faced several barriers to getting off the ground. Currently, the department can use commercial land leases only for carbon projects. 

Legislation introduced last session sought to allow direct revenue from credits, instead of relying on project developers to contract. However, the bill did not pass.

And there is 2-year-old pending litigation from the American Forest Resource Council, a trade association that believes the Department should have conducted an environmental impact statement before setting aside state forest land. In June, a Thurston County Superior Court judge ruled in favor of the Department, but the Council has since filed an appeal.  

“Considering there [are] very little, negligible, timber harvests on federal land in Washington … there is only so much that private forest lands can provide to sustain the infrastructure. We really depend on the DNR harvest program to do what we do,” said American Forest Resources Council public affairs director Nick Smith. 

So far, no sawmills in Washington have closed, according to Smith. But if they were, the economic impact would trickle down from large timber companies to small-forest landowners, who depend on the same infrastructure for their incomes and land management needs. 

The timber wars and the spotted owl

In 1994, deep divisions between environmentalists and the timber industry, known as the timber wars, resulted in the federal Northwest Forest Plan. 

Upon the plan’s conception, its design centered on the protection of the endangered spotted owl and old-growth forests in the Pacific Northwest. While the plan achieved its core ecological goals, environmentalists recognize it led to significant hardship for logging-dependent communities. The U.S. Forest Service is reviewing and amending the plan to reflect changes in the decades since it was written. 

“There’s a lot of trauma with the way that the spotted-owl wars played out, and it didn’t go away, even though the decisions were on Forest Service land over 30 years ago,” said Paula Sweden, policy director for Northwest Conservation, an organization committed to conserving local wildlands and wildlife. “And we don’t want to do that [with new policy].” 

To try to avoid history repeating itself, policymakers are turning to science. New research from the U.S. Department of Agriculture found that extending the harvest cycle on intensively managed lands from 35 to 70 years could double the carbon stored in live trees. 

However, the researchers noted that their findings differ from those of other studies, which emphasize the importance of allowing trees to live on as old-growth, typically over 100 years old, as mature forests capture the most carbon.

“If you look at a landscape scale, you can do both,” said Sweden, who believes in a balance of keeping forests that are old-growth in tandem with those that are managed for timber. 

Logging ancient trees releases significant emissions that would take a long time to offset with new growth, even with fast-growing trees that sequester carbon effectively, she said. However, sustainable forestry in younger forests also plays an important role, as it continually increases carbon storage by planting, harvesting and using the wood in building materials, rather than letting it die and decompose. 

Sweden said it’s important to balance the advantages of old growth and keeping jobs.

“Ask the question, ‘How do you optimize?’” said Sweden.