Tim Profeta, Director Nicholas Institute
Statement for Release of Harnessing Farms and Forests

Hi. I am Tim Profeta, director of the Nicholas Institute for Environmental Policy Solutions of Duke University, and I thank you for joining us today.

I want to welcome you all to our teleconference announcing the upcoming publication of Harnessing Farms and Forests in the Low Carbon Economy: How to Create, Measure, and Verify Greenhouse Gas Offsets..

This guide will come out in June and will be published by Duke Press. It is the product of several years of work, coordinated by Duke University, by scientists from Princeton University, Kansas State University, Stanford University, Brown University, Texas A&M, Colorado State, University of New Hampshire, Rice University, and several firms specializing in environmental statistics. The guide was edited by scientists at Environmental Defense, our partners in this project, including Zach Willey, who is with us today, and Bill Chameides, who is a member of the National Academy of Sciences.

We have come to a point where climate change is accepted by the scientific community as a real and present threat to our livelihood, one that is very likely attributable to a human-caused increase in atmospheric greenhouse gases.  To reverse this threat will require many simultaneous approaches to creating a new, low-carbon economy.

Foremost, large-scale reduction of greenhouse gas pollution will be required across its many sources in our diverse economy, including our electricity and transportation sectors. 

• But we’re here today because our lands and forests may be the first, best front for beginning to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions today.
• Our lands hold tremendous potential for sequestering emissions, keeping them from the atmosphere and from warming our planet, as well as opportunities to stop emissions from diffuse sources across the landscape.
• So there lies the enormous opportunity for owners and managers of farmlands and forests to participate in the solution. 
• Just by changing their tillage practices, farmers can remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and sequester it in the soil;
• They can also modify agricultural practices to reduce greenhouse gases such as methane emitted in livestock and rice production, and nitrous oxide in soil management. 
• Farmers and other land managers can plant of trees on currently non-forested lands and transfer large volumes of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere to carbon storage in biomass, soils, and harvested products.

 

• These activities can make an enormous difference in reducing the global warming threat.
• And under the right system, they can generate entire new sources of revenue for rural America.

In Congress today, there is much debate about the need to enact a U.S. carbon cap, and potentially a “cap and trade” system, where these actions can be turned into credits farmers and others can sell to industry required to reduce their greenhouse gas pollution. A number of bills have been introduced, and we expect that sometime in the next year or two there will be legislation.

Yet many people, from the Midwest to Washington to Wall Street, have recognized that bringing farmers and foresters to the table requires a system that accurately measures and accounts for their greenhouse gas reductions.

• Farmers and foresters need information on exactly what practices will bring what types of reductions – exactly how much they are reducing and what those reductions are worth.
• Industrial purchasers, and their investors, need to be sure the reductions are real.
• Congress needs to be sure these practices will really reduce the greenhouse gas pollution of the United States.

 

 This book builds the framework of just such a system by combining the analysis of top scientists and economists in agriculture, land use and forestry with the practical experience of greenhouse gas mitigation project developers.  The book will describe an approach that is scientifically grounded, has environmental integrity and is practical to apply. 

We imagine this guide on the desks of American farmers, Wall Street brokers, and industry representatives looking for ways to reduce America’s greenhouse gas emissions.

Bringing science into practice lies at the very core of the mission of the Nicholas Institute for Environmental Policy Solutions at Duke University.  We believe that good science is the foundation of good environmental policy and practice.  We also recognize that connecting science to practice often requires the type of hard work evident in the pages of this volume. 

For that, we extend great thanks to all of the technical experts who contributed to this effort and in particular to Zach Willey and Bill Chameides for coordinating, synthesizing and communicating their work with a clear structure and logical tone.  We believe that the collective effort constitutes a “gold standard” for the inclusion of agriculture and forest activities in greenhouse gas offset programs.

On today’s call you will hear from W.R. Zach Willey, an Economist for Environmental Defense’s Climate and Air Program, and one of the lead authors of the guide.

We are also privileged to have Dick Wittman, who farms, ranches and has extensive timber holdings on the family operation in Idaho. The former president of the Pacific NW Direct Seed Association, Dick worked with Environmental Defense to aggregate one of the first direct soil carbon leases to a major utility. 

After everyone’s statements, we will have time for some Q and A, and our operators will tell us how that will work.