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SmartWood offers growers 'green seal'
Published: Sunday, January 20, 2008
By Candace Page
Free Press Staff Writer
BRISTOL -- Snow fell softly as four visitors climbed a gently sloping woods road to survey one of Vermont's first green-certified forests.
Landowner Emile Cote tends his 68 acres of maple, red oak, black birch and pine with future generations in mind. Forester David Brynn has turned that vision into a plan to harvest timber while nurturing bigger, older trees, avoiding fragile natural areas, and protecting biodiversity.
Kara Wires of SmartWood audits Cote's operation to verify that it meets exacting environmental and social standards set by the international Forest Stewardship Council. Timber cut from Cote's woodlot will carry the FSC and SmartWood seals.
Richard Donovan, Wires' boss, runs SmartWood, the forestry division of the Rainforest Alliance. From the unlikely setting of a former underwear factory in Richmond, his staff roams the globe, deciding whether millions of acres, from redwood forests in California to teak stands in Indonesia, deserve the FSC green seal.
SmartWood helped pioneer the burgeoning green-certification movement in forestry, which with modest success aims to turn improved forest practices into extra money in owners' pockets.
Cote received a premium price, for example, when he sold 35,000 board feet of oak and maple to Middlebury College for a building project. "It's one of the best investments I've made," he said of the woodlot he owns with two partners.
Now, SmartWood's certification system may offer a kind of structural blueprint as Vermont looks for new ways to make its forests pay while helping to slow global climate change.
Healthy forests act as enormous sinks, pulling carbon dioxide from the air and storing it in wood and soil. Already, SmartWood certifies the carbon value of reforestation in tropical countries. Carbon credits for those projects then can be bought and sold in markets in Europe and elsewhere to offset carbon emissions from tailpipes and power plants.
In heavily wooded northern New England, opportunities for reforestation are limited. Instead, foresters have begun to consider ways woodlot owners could change timber harvest patterns to increase carbon storage.
In November, Gov. Jim Douglas committed Vermont to finding a way to leverage its open spaces into carbon credits and establishing a Vermont Green Standard for verifying the value of all kinds of carbon credits.
Cote's forest already stores more carbon than if it were managed in a traditional way, logged more often with more wood removed, Brynn and Donovan said. What's missing is a system to set a value on that extra carbon storage.
Growing greener forests
SmartWood asked hundreds of questions before deciding that Cote's woodlot met 12 principles set by the Forest Stewardship Council, questions such as:
Does the logging plan ensure the woodlot will continue to produce high-quality saw logs for many years?
Are logging roads kept at a distance from wetlands, vernal pools and other sensitive areas? Are they built carefully to minimize erosion?
Does his logging contractor use practices that minimize damage to standing trees?
Does his management plan for the forest respect the economy and values of the nearby community?
In Cote's case, many of the answers to the SmartWood certifiers' questions are visible in the forest itself.
His logging roads are smooth and largely erosion-free, even during a January thaw. Recently cut stumps are scattered thinly through the forest next to high-value hard maples and red oaks, showing Cote did not simply harvest the best and leave the rest.
The words "vernal pool" are spray-painted on a tree, warning of a 50-foot buffer zone around a tiny pond where salamanders breed in the spring.
All-terrain-vehicle tracks are visible on the logging roads, marks of a recreational activity important to some of Cote's neighbors. FSC standards include a requirement to enhance the long-term social and economic well-being of forest workers and local communities.
"I want to do things right. You pay attention to the latest research, so you know you are doing the things you should be doing," said Cote. The retired assistant director of technical education in Essex and two partners have owned the woodlot for 23 years. Parts of the land have been logged four times in that period.
Cote's forest management is handled by the nonprofit Vermont Family Forests in Bristol. Brynn, the group's director, is certified by SmartWood and in turn certifies his members' woods.
Each year, SmartWood audits a sampling of the forests to make sure the FSC standards are being met.
"It looks like we were a little tight here," Brynn said last week, as he, Donovan, Wires and Cote looked at the stump of a big black birch left after a logging operation. The stump sat right at the edge or perhaps inside the informal buffer zone around the vernal pool.
If a SmartWood auditor saw a pattern of such encroachments on the woodlots Brynn manages, Donovan said, a warning would be included in the auditor's report (although that has not happened).
Show me the money
Foresters say more and more Vermont woodlot owners and loggers are committed to improved forestry practices. But only 140,000 of Vermont's 4 million acres of forestland have been certified by SmartWood.
(Other tracts have been certified by competing systems, including the Sustainable Forestry Initiative sponsored by the forest products industry.)
Cost is one barrier.
Certification and regular auditing are costly. Certification for a group of small woodlot owners can cost $4,500 to $6,500, Donovan said. Staying certified costs Vermont Family Forests $2,500 to $3,000 a year.
"And that doesn't count our internal costs to prepare for the audit," Brynn said. "Of course, we have to pass that cost along to our members."
Here's the problem: Woodlot owners cannot consistently get a higher price for their green-certified timber to offset the cost of being certified.
"I get the premium only when price becomes secondary to philosophy," said Ken Gagnon of Gagnon Lumber in Pittsford, an FSC-certified lumberyard that buys and sells certified wood. For the average consumer, the pocketbook is No. 1.
Thus, while institutions like Middlebury College and the University of Vermont have been willing to pay more for local, certified wood, most customers have not.
A lot of landowners are shaking their heads. "We were led to believe if you obtained a green label, you would get a higher return for the product. That isn't playing out," said Ed Larson, executive director of the Vermont Forest Products Association.
"You don't get certified because you want the green premium," Donovan acknowledged, though he said market demand has made green certification almost a necessity for industrial forests harvested for pulp and paper.
Selling carbon storage
Emile Cote is committed to maintaining a certified woodlot, even if it doesn't bring him a higher price.
But the infant market for forest carbon credits holds out the hope of an alternate way to make the forest pay: by selling the carbon storage value of his trees.
That is Gov. Douglas' vision.
Vermont would write a green standard for carbon credits, covering forest carbon as well as other carbon offsets. Vermont's standard, Douglas has said, could become the nationally recognized standard.
Vermont would then accredit certifiers, groups like the Rainforest Alliance and others, who would verify that claimed carbon credits were valid. Separate auditors would check the work of the certifiers to keep them honest.
Douglas' hope is that this would develop into a big business, drawing certifying and auditing groups to establish a base of operations in Vermont.
From his perch in Richmond, Donovan is both hopeful and skeptical -- skeptical that a single small state can seize the lead in the hotly contested market for setting carbon standards; hopeful that a credible carbon credit standard for existing forests can be written.
"Our perspective is that there is good enough science to make conservative projections, very conservative projections, about the amount of additional carbon storage that occurs when timber harvesting frequency and selection is changed to maximize carbon uptake.
"It would be a hugely important tool in forest preservation," he said. "But we want to make sure the science is good. If it is not done rigorously, it won't be credible."
In Bristol, Cote looks forward to the day.
"I'd love to receive payment to leave these trees and let them grow longer," he said.
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