Carbon markets underestimate the risks U.S. forests face from climate change

The world’s forests form a vast network of carbon reservoirs, keeping carbon sequestered from the atmosphere where its presence is disrupting Earth’s climate systems. Many corporate, national and sub-national climate policies rely on forests’ essential ability to store carbon, often tracked and funded through a system of “carbon credits” issued to polluting industries in exchange for protecting and restoring forests.

But if trees die — from wildfire, drought or insect infestation — large amounts of greenhouse gasses are released, exacerbating ongoing climate change. And the warming climate is accelerating this problem by making such disturbances more frequent and severe, but only in some places and not in others.

Scientists at the University of Utah and UC Santa Barbara, in collaboration with international experts, sought to determine which forests are most likely to release their stored carbon over the next 100 years, and whether current carbon-credit systems accurately account for those risks.

The results, published in Nature, show that there are places in the United States where carbon emissions from die-backs far exceed what is currently accounted for in carbon-credit systems. This is particularly true for the parched American West. Fortunately, the researchers point out ways it can be corrected.