Carbon Credit versus the Huge Gulp / Public Information Service
By Katherine Ellison for Hothouse.
Broadcast version by Suzanne Potter for California News Service reporting for the Solutions Journalism Network-Public News Service Collaboration
Twitchell Island, Sacramento County, California – Steve Deverel gazes out over a levee on the San Joaquin River to a buoy where half a dozen sea lions are barking. It’s a loud reminder that even here, 50 miles inland, some of California’s most productive farmland lies perilously close to the Pacific Ocean. At any moment, a weak spot in the more than 1,000 miles of earthen levees protecting islands in the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta could unleash a salty deluge, threatening not just crops, but the drinking water for as many as 27 million Californians.
Deverel, a Davis-based hydrologist, refers to this threat as “The Big Gulp,” a breach that would suck in tens of billions of gallons of river water, drawing ocean water in its wake. All it would take is some heavy rain, a moderate earthquake, or even hard-working gophers tunneling through earthen barriers first built in the late 1800s.
It wouldn’t be the first time such a disaster happened.
On a sunny day in June 1972, a levee failed without warning or apparent cause near Andrus Island, about an hour’s drive from San Francisco. Water ran four feet deep over the farmland. Thirty-foot cruisers and houseboats smashed against the embankments. Hundreds of homeowners fled rising waters, with several people seriously injured. In 2004-on another calm, sunny day-it happened again. This time the water turned 12,000 acres of prime California farmland into a brackish lake, costing $100 million in damages.
Deverel now hopes to save the Delta by flooding it before the Pacific can. And he wants to pay for it with carbon credits.
“Carbon-farming” in the wetlands
Deverel, 70, has spent three decades trying to head off the Big Gulp. Climate change is his chance. His project, funded to date by California state agencies and the University of California, has so far inundated 1,700 acres of Delta farmland on Twitchell and nearby Sherman island, transforming them into marshes of cattails and tule reeds. Each year, new plants growing in these restored wetlands will suck carbon dioxide (CO₂)-the most abundant greenhouse gas-out of the atmosphere, storing it in strata of accumulating muck that will help buttress the dikes in danger of collapsing.
The project passed its first important milestone on October 27, 2020, when the American Carbon Registry issued credits for 52,000 tons of CO₂ removed by the experiment, which is still in its very early stage. That makes this the first wetland project (and only one so far) to generate verified carbon credits in the US, according to Steve Crooks, a Sausalito, California-based wetlands scientist and global expert in the field of “carbon-farming” from coastal wetlands.
The Delta project is also one of very few such efforts around the world, yet its promise is enormous.
Even as they cover just 9% of the Earth’s surface, wetlands are the largest natural carbon sink on land, sequestering an estimated 35% of the world’s carbon stored on land, more than all other biomes combined. Since a majority of wetlands are degraded or destroyed, environmental scientists see restoring them as a huge potential source of carbon credits as countries and corporations ramp up their commitments to cut greenhouse gas emissions. Rehabilitating the earth’s wetlands would provide myriad benefits in addition to carbon sequestration, possibly even more environmentally useful than carbon projects in forestry.
Yet managing these landscapes is a lot more complicated-and expensive-than simply flooding fields or replanting trees. Deverel believes the Delta project has revealed a path forward. The key is a rich, brown crumbly soil known as peat.
The promise of peat
A few thousand years after the end of the last Ice Age, the Delta was covered by a marshy, freshwater inland sea. Over millennia, layers of moss, mud, and vegetation accumulated to form peat. Under the right conditions, peatlands can store vast amounts of carbon. Marshes “sequester” or store CO₂ through photosynthesis as they grow, and the carbon stays trapped in the plants as they die and decompose underwater. Once drained, however, peat can be fabulous for growing crops, as farmers who came here after the Gold Rush soon discovered. The farmers, known as “swamplanders,” hired Chinese laborers to build the levees and drain the marshes, and planted rows and rows of corn and alfalfa, much later adding other crops, including wine grapes, walnut and almond trees, cotton, sugar beets, and blueberries.
More than a century would pass before scientists realized the farmers were harvesting their own ruin.
The problem is known as “subsidence,” a gentle word for a sinister situation. When peat dries, it oxidizes and evaporates, or is swept away by the wind, steadily robbing the Delta islands of about an inch in height each year. As they shrink in volume, the islands provide less and less of a buffer against the water pressure on the aging levees.
Subsidence explains why you can stand on a grassy field here, some 300 feet from the levees’ edge, and look up to watch ships passing on the river. Some parts of Twitchell and other Delta islands are now more than 20 feet below sea level. Subsidence, and the growing pressure on the levees, also explain why there’s more to the threat than the specter of water someday coursing over the levees. In some areas it’s already seeping under them, says Deverel. That’s forcing farmers to fortify old embankments while continually draining their land.
There’s also a broader threat. Soggy peatlands can be powerful carbon sinks. All that changes when the peat dries out. As peat oxidizes, it releases stored CO₂. In the Delta, this translates to an area of about 150,000 acres of soil turned into “this weird little chimney in the middle of the state that is just pumping out carbon dioxide,” says Campbell Ingram, executive director of the Delta Conservancy, a state agency that is collaborating with Deverel on the carbon-credits project.
Over more than 30 years of careful measurements, Deverel has found that each year, on average, each of those acres of dried-peat farmland emits roughly ten tons of CO₂, roughly equivalent to the annual emissions of 217,000 gas-powered cars.
Deverel, Ingram, and their colleagues see this as an opportunity.
Inundating the land, and allowing the ancient bulrushes and cattails to return-or potentially cultivating rice-would stop those emissions immediately, and even store carbon as new plants grow. Deverel and Ingram hope the process could start to reverse the subsidence by adding as much as two inches of soil a year as watery plants die and form new peat. “It’s slow, yes-it could take 150 years to get back to sea-level,” says Ingram. “But every added foot reduces the pressure on the levees.”
Restoring Delta wetlands would have many other benefits as well. Healthy wetlands help filter freshwater, offer habitat for wildlife, and provide a buffer for flood control-all services increasingly in demand as climate change brings more devastating droughts and rising sea levels. In this way, the Delta project could shift the carbon credits paradigm, using the credits not only to reduce or “mitigate” greenhouse gas emissions but to help adapt to the inevitable results of climate change in coming years.
“This project is still in its early stages but we’re very hopeful about what it implies for California’s sustainability,” says Michelle Passero, director of climate and nature-based solutions for The Nature Conservancy. The international non-profit, which owns an entire Delta island, has recently begun working with Deverel to greatly expand the scope of his plan, converting 4,000 acres from corn to rice and another 1,000 to restore wetlands habitat. Passero says they hope to generate carbon credits from the project within the next few years, providing income to pay for more restoration, and ideally creating a model for others to follow.
To do so, however, the Delta’s defenders still need to overcome three daunting obstacles: the science, the expense, and the politics of wetlands conversion.
The Devil’s in the data
In the first US attempt to farm carbon in US wetlands, the scientific calculations didn’t add up.
In December 2013, Tierra Resources, a small environmental restoration firm based in New Orleans, announced that the American Carbon Registry had approved its “revolutionary new tool:” a “first of its kind” methodology to restore degraded wetlands in the Gulf of Mexico.
Seven years later, however, the company quietly canceled its pilot project in a Louisiana swamp. The problem was “high uncertainty with the data,” wrote Tierra Resources CEO Sarah Mack in an email. The ACR requires periodic monitoring reports, meaning carbon farmers must continually prove they’re doing what they initially promised.
Mack, who later consulted on the California Delta project, praised Deverel and colleagues for what she described as their pioneering work. “They showed it can be done,” she said, “and that is going to encourage other scientists to follow them.”
As Mack acknowledged, the Delta project has had some key advantages over her own effort. For one thing, after three decades of studying and measuring emissions from the land, Deverel has more scientific certainty. But more important is the problem of methane, a greenhouse gas that is about 25 times more powerful than CO2.
All wetlands emit methane, as anaerobic soil microbes digest growing plants. But Mack’s wetlands in the Gulf of Mexico lacked the key ingredient of peat. In peat wetlands, inundating the land-and stopping up those weird little chimneys-has the potential to reduce so much CO2 that it would more than compensate for new methane emissions, according to Deverel.
Peat’s promise is already inspiring some mega-projects in swamp forests, bogs, and fens, many thousands of miles away from the Delta. In Indonesia, the Katingan Metaya Project claims it is generating 7.5 million carbon credits per year from peat-rich forests, avoiding emissions equal to those of France. In Scotland, a fast-fashion billionaire is working on a project to farm carbon from peatlands on his extensive landholdings. Closer to home, in North Carolina, scientists have investigated the potential for a carbon farm on 10,000 acres of previously drained pocosins, wetland bogs with woody shrubs and sandy peat soil.
The clock is ticking. As peatlands increasingly dry out, those “weird little chimneys” are popping up all over the planet, potentially creating a dangerous feedback loop for climate change. That makes it all the more important that the Delta defenders find answers to the economic and political challenges of wetlands restoration.
Show me the money
Wetlands restoration is expensive, and the Delta carbon project is no exception. Over the past 12 years, California state agencies have spent nearly $17 million restoring and managing wetlands in the project area, according to Bryan Brock, an engineer for the California Department of Water Resources (DWR). That bill would have been much larger had the land not already been owned by DWR. Another $1.5 million was spent on research-related expenses, including 10 eddy covariance stations, which can cost $50,000 each, to measure gas flows and temperature changes over the wetlands.
Now, the biggest hurdle is making the project financially sustainable. For all its expense, the project has yet to produce any revenue. Carbon credits issued so far have gone to the project landowner, DWR, which can’t sell the credits due to rules forbidding profits from publicly funded projects, as Brock explains.
To finance more wetlands restoration, the Delta team must do the political work of convincing thousands of farmers to convert at least some of their land from profitable crops to marshes or rice, and then keep them that way for a minimum of 40 years. Carbon prices have been rising, but at less than $10/ton for the voluntary market, are still far from enough to change a lot of minds.
“It’s a bit ridiculous,” is how Bruce Blodgett, executive director of the San Joaquin Farm Bureau Federation, characterizes the Delta carbon-farming proposal. “Are we supposed to buy our seeds with carbon credits?”
Blodgett worries the state will step in and force farmers to participate. He insists the Delta farmers are doing just fine dealing with subsidence by paying property taxes to fund work on the levees and, as long as the water keeps flowing, he doesn’t want to change. “We have one area in the entire state of California that we know we can still be farming 150 years from now,” he says, “and they want to plant tules there.”
Yet Mother Nature increasingly has put her finger on the scales. As sea levels rise, that salty water seeping under the levees is already threatening crops, while farmers must pay more to keep draining their land. The increasing threats from climate change may also eventually move governments to act more aggressively, which could raise the price of carbon credits and provide another inducement for the farmers. “If we get to $100 a ton, that solves the problem,” says Deverel.
In the meantime, he continues with his research and plans for the next phase of the project, on The Nature Conservancy land, continuing with the work that has now consumed more than half of his life. Progress so far has been small and slow, and maybe even a little nerve-wracking if you’re the sort who tends to doom-scroll climate news.
But Deverel isn’t one for doom-scrolling. “This is what I am called to do now,” he says. “I don’t need to worry about the entire stairway, just the next step.”
Katherine Ellison wrote this article for Hothouse.
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By Elizabeth McGowan for Energy News Network.
Broadcast version by Edwin J. Viera for Virginia News Connection reporting for the Solutions Journalism Network-Public News Service Collaboration
The hands-on solar panel lesson for rookies at Sankofa Community Orchard in mid-January might have been a bust if student Mary Lewis hadn’t shown up with her A-game — and her F-150 pickup truck.
When the team was short a power drill, Lewis scurried to her trusty toolbox. Then, for a tape measure. And yet again for exterior screws.
The 58-year-old’s preparedness proved integral to completing the installation of a six-panel array designed to power the water irrigation system at the urban agricultural venture on the city’s south side.
Lewis, owner of a home repair business, was one of 15 enrollees in a week-long class this month geared at diversifying the clean energy workforce.
Richmond resident Richard Walker brainstormed the free solar training to ensure that Black residents and other marginalized communities aren’t left behind as renewable energy booms in Virginia. It’s a more recent offshoot of a nonprofit, Bridging the Gap, the 63-year-old founded more than a dozen years ago.
In June 2019, he debuted the training program as an environmental justice experiment in a church basement in majority-Black, rural Union Hill to counter Dominion Energy’s proposal to construct the Atlantic Coast Pipeline through Buckingham County.
“We’ve been remiss in educating folks about green energy in our neighborhoods,” Walker said about his early attempts to heal a rift over the gas pipeline in a community where his family has deep roots. “This is where people need to be exposed to these possibilities.”
He moved subsequent trainings to the state’s capital, where Walker has partnered with Richmond’s Office of Community Wealth Building and its Department of Parks, Recreation and Community Facilities.
Lewis, also a real estate agent and investor, is enthusiastic about sharing what she absorbs with her network of personal and business connections.
“This is something I believe in,” Lewis said. “Solar just seems like a natural next step.”
Lewis and her classmates spent most of the week of Jan. 10 hunkered down in a training room at the Annie Giles Community Resource Center near downtown Richmond sponging up photovoltaic fundamentals from newly minted instructor Duane Cunningham.
The intensive course covers the ABCs — arcs, breakers, and charge controllers — but also delves into the intricacies of components, sizing principles, mechanical design, performance analysis, and troubleshooting.
Last year, Walker hand-picked Cunningham because of the 46-year-old’s electrical engineering degree, IT-heavy background, and ability to translate technical gobbledygook into comprehensible concepts for laypeople.
The California native settled in Hampton, Virginia, three years ago to begin work as a data center manager for a defense contractor affiliated with Langley Air Force Base.
Cunningham was receptive to Walker’s overture because overseas travel for the military through 2016 had exposed him to how countries as varied as Germany, Australia, and Kuwait were embracing renewable energy. The two met because Cunningham also volunteers for a separate, youth-oriented nonprofit in Buckingham County.
Walker had recruited author and professional trainer Sean White, a Californian with decades of international experience, to teach the initial Solar 101 class in Union Hill. As well, White taught follow-up classes in November 2019 and last October.
Cunningham enrolled in the October class and absorbed every detail. To qualify to teach, he had to ace the gold standard exam offered by the North American Board of Certified Energy Practitioners. Passing it gives newcomers clout and access to jobs anywhere.
What troubles Walker is that of the 30-plus graduates in the first three sessions, Cunningham is the only graduate to even attempt the exam.
Enrollees have consistently been a cross-section of men and women ranging in age from their early 20s to late 50s. Some have college degrees and established careers, while others had struggled in the job market after being released from prison.
“That’s still part of the learning curve,” Walker said. “We don’t have a placement rate yet because the glitch is the folks we get in the training class don’t seem to have the confidence to take the test.”
‘I can see solar as a career path’
Cunningham is determined to alter that pattern.
“I grew up in Compton, so it’s not foreign to me where they have come from,” Cunningham said about his early exposure to hardscrabble California. “I have family members who are incarcerated and friends who have lost their lives making bad decisions.”
Each day, he sandwiched pep talks between reviews that summarized lessons into bite-size nuggets and dissected sample exam questions.
“It all begins up here,” Cunningham said, tapping his temple. “They all have the ability to pass the test. I told them that if I’m going to give you 100% here, I need to know you gave yourself a chance.”
Student Reggie Davis is receptive to such an opportunity. He figures it’s kismet that the invitation to join Cunningham’s class arrived when he began noticing how rooftop solar was flourishing in his Richmond neighborhood.
For the last five months, the 53-year-old has honed his landscaping skills as part of the city’s workforce development program. It’s geared to help unemployed and formerly incarcerated residents transition to jobs.
“I’m grateful to be exposed to this,” said Davis, who buried his nose in his notes each evening as a refresher. “Now I don’t want to limit myself. I can see solar as a career path instead of just a job.”
He appreciated Cunningham’s willingness to apply solar lessons to real-life situations.
“Yes, we’re learning a lot, but once I got the verbiage down, it’s really not that hard,” he said. “Duane’s reviews made me more comfortable. He wanted this information to stick.”
Davis, raised in Florida, New York, Illinois, and Louisiana, landed in Richmond in the late 1980s to major in business at Virginia Union, a historically black university.
That degree — and a starting spot on the basketball team — never materialized as a “detour” dealing cocaine and other drugs turned into convictions that sent him to state prison for close to 12 years.
“I’m through with that life,” he said. Since his 2003 release, he worked at Hewlett-Packard for a decade before starting his own lawn care business.
Davis knows that despite the solar industry’s earnest efforts to attract more people of color, it’s rare to find Black men such as himself in that workforce.
He praised Walker for punching through those barriers.
“We need people like Richard to not only bring us into a new world,” he said about his classmates, “but to bring them, the solar developers, to our world.”
Cunningham had helped to install the first three panels at Sankofa last autumn. Davis piggybacked on that start by applying his new knowledge to add another trio of flush-mounted panels atop a shipping container and a shed.
The farm, situated on roughly two acres of parks and recreation land near Reedy Creek, is designed to address social and racial imbalances from the ground up, said Duron Chavis, food activist and executive director of The Happily Nature Day, a nonprofit.
Enormous colorful murals serve as backdrops for dozens of fruit trees, fruiting shrubs, vegetable plots, and a beekeeping operation. The harvests are destined for the community. Gardeners distribute 4-by-6 foot raised beds and soil so neighbors can grow their own food too.
Chavis’ goal is to be a model of climate change resiliency by incorporating low-impact systems to collect rainwater, manage stormwater runoff, and harvest energy from the sun.
Carving a niche in central Virginia
Personal setbacks motivated Walker, a professional mental health counselor, to invent Bridging the Gap as a job conduit for Virginians wrestling with addiction, incarceration, and chronic homelessness.
After serving concurrent, two-year federal and state prison sentences for cocaine possession and fraud years ago, nobody would hire him. And he faced such rejection with a bachelor’s degree.
Walker opted to fold green workforce development and environmental justice into his nonprofit’s mission after watching yet another Black community — his own — be saddled with the threat of polluting fossil fuel infrastructure.
He can trace at least five generations of his family back to Union Hill, where free Blacks and former slaves settled in Buckingham County after the Civil War. It’s about 70 miles west of Richmond.
In January 2020, a federal appeals court put the kibosh on a compressor station that had divided neighbors when Dominion sited it in Union Hill. About six months later, the utility giant pulled the plug on the entire questionable pipeline project that would have bisected Virginia for roughly 300 of its 600 miles. It would have pumped hydraulically fractured gas from West Virginia to North Carolina.
While Walker’s solar training went dormant during the pandemic, he couldn’t bear for it to be a casualty of COVID-19.
A large grant from the Mertz Gilmore Foundation allows him to issue $1,000 scholarships to each enrollee. More recently, he’s attracted smaller sums from sources in Alexandria and Charlottesville and is intent on pursuing federal dollars.
If the General Assembly approves an $80,000 appropriation allotted to the Virginia Community College System as part of the state budget by Del. Jeff Bourne, a Democrat from Richmond, Walker would have access to that money for more training.
Longtime backers include the Virginia Environmental Justice Collaborative, Virginia Interfaith Power & Light, and programs under the University of Richmond umbrella.
“I want to carve my niche in central Virginia as the program that provides free training,” said Walker, aware that competitors charge enrollees. “If I can get full-time instructors, what I can do is limitless.”
Hiring White was expensive but gave the class credibility. Now that Walker has permission from White to adopt and adapt his original class curriculum, he can save some money and promote home-grown talent. As well, he has added a unit on energy efficiency to keep the class fresh.
To dovetail with the eight to 10 classes he proposes offering annually in Richmond, he’s collaborating with Bridging the Gap colleagues to open a Green Jobs Workforce Center this spring in Buckingham County’s Dillwyn, near Union Hill. Its wheelhouse will be training in solar, plumbing, electrical wiring, fiber optics, and heating and air conditioning.
“Solar has taken flight, but related jobs haven’t been open to communities of color and low-income Virginians,” Walker said about addressing inequities. “Training can lead to decent-paying jobs in these fields.”
Lewis, the recent graduate with an established career, isn’t intrigued by “getting on people’s roofs to install solar panels,” but is toying with the idea of sales.
Her desire to explore solar’s intricacies in Walker’s class was piqued because she put a four-panel, 100-watt system on her garage roof several years ago. She’s thrilled by the drop in her electric bill and, now, has the know-how to expand. Next, she wants to install a ground-mount system to power her house in Chesterfield County, south of Richmond.
In class, the go-getter peppered Cunningham with questions from her front-row seat.
“It has been a super class because it’s gone so deep and I’m kind of sorry the week is coming to an end,” Lewis said. “I wish I would’ve known all this 15 years ago because I’d be reaping the benefits now.”
Lewis is accustomed to navigating around obstacles. For instance, 15 years ago when she owned a dump truck company, she accepted a dare from one of her drivers to earn a commercial driver’s license. She practiced and studied until she passed the test.
That same tenacity is motivating her to sign up for the North American Board of Certified Energy Practitioners exam. Walker’s program covers the fee and students have 10 tries to pass the 85-question, multiple-choice exam.
When reached by phone the week after the class ended, Lewis was headed to a church to replace a bathroom urinal. She’s been diligent about studying, she said, and is scheduling a test appointment later this month.
“When I start something, I’m going to finish it,” Lewis said. “I’m just not a quitter.”
Elizabeth McGowan wrote this article for Energy News Network.
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By Sakshi Udavant for Next City.
Broadcast version by Edwin J. Viera for New York News Connection reporting for the Solutions Journalism Network-Public News Service Collaboration
Urban areas in US cities are estimated to lose an average of 36 million trees every year. This results in economic losses of up to $786 million and risks having an adverse impact on already worsening climate change.
The worse part? Many of these trees are considered “waste” and sent off to landfills. “More wood from cities goes into landfills than is harvested from US National Forests,” says J. Morgan Grove, a research forester at Baltimore Field Station, USDA Forest Service. “40% of this wood can be reused for furniture, flooring, outdoor play areas, mulch, compost, soil improvements, bioenergy and even carbon sources for growing mushrooms.”
That’s what “reforestation hubs” are doing: Saving urban trees from heading to landfills by finding new ways to repurpose the wood. These wooden products can be sold to fund further tree plantations. This cycle reduces urban wood waste, saves money, helps increase forest cover, and most importantly, keeps carbon out of the environment.
“If we recycled all the trees that came down in US cities each year, roughly 20 million tons of carbon could be kept out of the atmosphere, equivalent to taking over four million gas-powered cars off the road for a year,” says Ben Christensen, CEO and co-founder of Cambium Carbon, a New York-based startup working on reforesting America by creating the aforementioned wood repurposing-reforesting cycle.
Reforestation Hub, an initiative by The Nature Conservancy (a global environmental organization) and American Forests (a US-based forest conservation nonprofit), estimates up to 133 million acres of formerly forested lands in the United States could be reforested, absorbing 333 million metric tons of carbon per year, which is equivalent to keeping 72 million cars off the road. That’s why the organization calls it “a low-tech, scalable and proven solution to climate change.”
Creating a Circular Economy
Organizations like Cambium Carbon play a huge role in making this circular economy possible. For instance, Cambium Carbon works at three critical points: 1) saving the trees from ending up in landfills when they’re first cut down or have fallen, 2) collaborating with millers and sawyers who can use the “wasted” wood, and 3) working with architects, builders and furniture brands who provide the market to incentivize salvage. This way, fallen urban trees go from being a “landfill filler” to a valuable commodity that creates resources for increasing the declining forest cover in US cities.
The organization claims to have diverted more than 45 tons of wood from landfills, moving about 291,000 board feet of wood or roughly 489 tons of finished product. They’re now starting a new furniture line with Sabai Design, a sustainable furniture brand in Philadelphia, and planting new trees with the Sacramento Tree Foundation and the Baltimore Tree Trust. Their goal is to plant one billion new trees across the U.S. by 2030, the team mentioned in an interview with Next Pittsburgh.
Cambium Carbon is not alone. Other organizations like Cities4Forests and the Arbor Day Foundation are working with local officials to create the nation’s first reforestation hubs by 2022 through a TNC Natural Climate Change Solutions Accelerator Grant.
Is the Solution Worth the Costs?
While collecting fallen trees from urban spaces and using them to make locally-sold wooden products sounds like the perfect idea to reduce wastage and make supply chains more sustainable, all of this is easier said than done.
One drawback is that the barriers and costs of these alternative wood waste programs may outweigh the benefits, says Melissa McHale, associate professor of Urban Ecology and Sustainability, UBC Faculty of Forestry. “Many cities lack the space to store, sort and process the wood waste, and the cost of creating a space like this, in terms of dollars and time, is prohibitive,” says McHale, who also served on the leadership team for the United States Forest Service’s Denver Urban Field Station (USFS DUFS). “Many cities do not have the ability to maintain and remove all of their problem or dead trees and depend on private companies to do so. Private companies, especially the smaller businesses, often do not have the time and equipment needed to remove a tree whole and transport it wherever it needs to go.”
Fortunately, several organizations are stepping up with resources and ideas to make the wood repurposing process more efficient. For instance, Reforestation Hub maps out “relatively low-cost and feasible options to restore forests.” The web-based tool highlights several key areas for affordable reforestation like large open patches within forests, croplands with challenging soils and post-burn landscapes. It also offers handy access to reforestation resources like links to find a professional forester, find your state’s urban and community tree coordinator and access published articles on cost-effective tree planting.
Beyond helping the planet for years to come, initiatives like these also support local communities. Cambium Carbon has created a national network of local producers and national buyers to purchase locally salvaged, locally milled wood, which further funds local tree planting. For example, the communal tables in the entrepreneurship hubs on Towson University’s campus are made of wood that would have otherwise gone to waste. Similarly, the trellis in the Visit Baltimore HQ office was made using “waste” now repurposed into what the team calls “Carbon Smart Wood.”
“It’s a big opportunity to put people first and to have projects that are not just good for the planet but are really good for communities,” CEO Ben Christensen said in an interview with the Arbor Day Foundation. “[We’re] creating systems that are helping to address problems like lack of employment and helping to support economic recovery coming out of COVID.”
Cambium Carbon has employed 25 workers while also creating additional employment and partnership opportunities for several local carpenters and woodworkers through their sales and inventory management platform, Traece. Since the wood is sourced, repurposed and sold locally, workers in the region find more projects (like working on the Towson University tables) and resources (companies buying the new wooden products) to generate revenue that they wouldn’t have access to if the fallen trees just went to a landfill.
Sakshi Udavant wrote this article for Next City.
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New York has seen growth in offshore wind investments, which advocates hope will continue into the new year.
In 2022, Gov. Kathy Hochul announced a $500 million investment in offshore wind for cleaner energy, as part of a goal to develop 9,000 megawatts of offshore wind power by 2035.
Another step forward for the industry is redevelopment of the 73-acre South Brooklyn Marine Terminal for the staging of construction, operations and maintenance for several offshore wind projects.
Fred Zalcman, director of the New York Offshore Wind Alliance, described other highlights.
“We’ve seen significant developments on several fronts,” Zalcman outlined. “First, we are seeing the start of construction on New York’s first utility-scale offshore wind project, the South Fork Wind Farm, which will be 130 megawatts; serve over 70,000 people on Long Island.”
He added there have been real estate commitments to develop a National Offshore Wind Training Center, and agreements between developers and environmental groups to protect the endangered North Atlantic right whale during wind-project construction.
Given many offshore wind projects take a long time to develop, some work which began in 2022 will carry over into the new year. Zalcman noted the work should pick up, especially at certain ports, and there are some innovations he expects the state to give a closer look.
“The state is also looking now at the potential for offshore wind in the deeper ocean environment,” Zalcman pointed out. “These will be sites situated off the coast of New York, and potentially deploying new innovative technologies called ‘floating wind.’ “
While he’s eager to see the project develop in the new year, Zalcman expects to encounter growing pains as well. He mentioned supply-chain issues, inflation, and other economic challenges for the industry.
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