How Efforts To Save Hawaii's Forests Are Preventing A 'Freshwater Crisis'

A hit TV show in the 1970s and ‘80s called The Beachcombers brought the town of Gibsons and its logging practices into homes across Canada. After years of pollution and land degradation, it became one of the first towns in the world to incorporate nature into the municipality’s finances. Developers have to take stock of what natural infrastructure is on their property before they build. The town also launched an initiative to encourage other places to calculate the value of their green infrastructure. So far, 30 of them have signed up across the Great White North.

As governments and businesses make pledges to cut their carbon emissions, planting tress has become a popular solution to combat the effects of climate change. But tree-planting schemes take time and proper management to actually be effective. Many efforts have failed to take some key factors into consideration, including types of trees, location, and even community-involvement.

Canopy works to preserve the untouched Broadback Forest, which stores twice as much carbon as the Amazon and is central to the Cree Nation. The nonprofit works with 750 corporations, including fashion brands, commercial printers, and publishers to reduce the amount of packaging they use and eliminate sourcing from biodiverse, ancient, and endangered forests. They help source waste from grain and other food harvests for packaging, paper, and fabric production and enlist companies’ support of conservation initiatives. They also partner with other groups to lobby the government to protect the Broadback forest.

As climate change alters environments across the United States, it has become increasingly important to manage watersheds as a preventative measure to wildfires. Amid responses across the country, one private-public partnership, the Rio Grande Water Fund, is leading the way, demonstrating enough success that the model has become federal policy. The Fund brings together government agencies, NGOs, businesses, and residents to fund watershed restoration which, in turn, creates jobs and build more resilient ecosystems.

Mangrove forests are known to be excellent storers of carbon and hosts of biodiversity, but they are also able to protect communities on coastlines from storm surge. However, many of the projects to restore these forests fail because they are rushed or planted in the wrong places. Scientists argue that organizers should focus on natural regrowth or “ecological mangrove restoration,” a science-based approach, which has been used in Indonesia and Guinea-Bissau.

A decade after California established its forest offset program as a way to incentivize saving trees to store carbon, a new analysis shows that it might not be working. Loopholes in the program allow for people to claim credits for trees that aren’t delivering the carbon benefits they should and ultimately results in companies emitting more pollution than is being stored. While this program has provided economic benefits for several Indigenous tribes, some argue that “the program creates the false appearance of progress when in fact it makes the climate problem worse.”

As the agriculture industry faces crop and profit loss due to catastrophic weather events, many farmers and ranchers are being catalysts for conversations with politicians, scientists, and environmental groups about how to combat the effects of climate change. Throughout the United States, key stakeholders in the food supply chain have formed working groups to discuss climate change and how their industry can work together to improve soil health and sequester carbon. While there are some who are not supportive of these efforts, there is a growing consensus around the importance of having these discussions.

Coordination and planning can prove to be the best defensive measures against wildfires. Funded by the US Forest Service, the Community Planning Assistance for Wild Program (CPAW) promotes community fire adaptation, including measures like prescribed burns. Policymakers and city planners enrolled in CPAW benefit from teaming up with foresters, economists, and other experts to model risk and mitigate the impact of fires.

Malawi ranks fourth in the world for deforestation rates, but the country is on a pathway to making a dent in recovery thanks to community and government efforts. In just one rainy season alone, running from December to April, the country has managed to plant 60 million tree seedlings and is showing no signs of slowing down. Designated as forestry season by the government, this initiative has helped spur a national planting movement from various entities including a hydroelectric power plant and singular individuals.

Prescribed burning or controlled burning is an ancestral indigenous practice in which specific sections of a forest are burned. Controlled burning also happens naturally like when lightning strikes a forest. Controlled burning is good for a forest, it gets rid of dead areas, leads to healthier soil by clearing the ground, and minimizes the strength of large fires. However, due to U.S. laws that criminalized controlled burns the practice was discouraged in the U.S. Now, due to climate change and larger fires, prescribed burning is making a come back.