In this week’s episode, host Daniel Raimi talks with David Wear, a nonresident senior fellow and director of the Land Use, Forestry, and Agriculture Program at Resources for the Future, about the ability of US forests to remove and store carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Wear discusses how US forests fit into emissions-reduction efforts, different approaches for estimating the amount of carbon dioxide that US forests can sequester, the implications of using different modeling approaches in designing policy, and the potential of afforestation and forest protection as carbon offsets.

References and recommendations:

“Land Use Change, No-Net-Loss Policies, and Effects on Carbon Dioxide Removals” by David N. Wear and Matthew Wibbenmeyer; https://www.rff.org/publications/working-papers/land-use-change-no-net-loss-policies-and-effects-on-carbon-dioxide-removals/

“Managing Wildfires to Combat Climate Change” episode of Resources Radio with David Wear; https://www.resources.org/resources-radio/managing-wildfires-to-combat-climate-change-with-david-wear/

“A Sand County Almanac” by Aldo Leopold; https://www.aldoleopold.org/about/aldo-leopold/sand-county-almanac/

“The American West as Living Space” by Wallace Stegner; https://press.umich.edu/Books/T/The-American-West-as-Living-Space

“The Great Cash-for-Carbon Hustle” by Heidi Blake; https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/10/23/the-great-cash-for-carbon-hustle