USAID

Q&A with Debbie Hammel, senior resource specialist with NRDC’s forests project and an internationally recognized expert on forest management.

Why should we be so concerned about protecting the world’s remaining forests?

Forests have a vital role to play in the fight against climate change. They are the largest terrestrial store of carbon, and they provide ecosystem services such as protecting water quality and preventing soil erosion. They are also home to much of the world’s biodiversity. Logging and conversion to agriculture destroy natural habitat for wildlife and release large quantities of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. Unfortunately, deforestation and degradation are continuing at an alarming rate. We lose more than 32 million acres of tropical forest each year -- the equivalent of 36 football fields a minute.

What are the main problem areas in the United States?

I’d single out our southern forests. These are some of the most biologically diverse temperate forests in the world, but the timber industry has been rapidly replacing them with pine plantations. If current trends continue, the acreage of those plantations could increase by 60 percent by 2040, when they would cover an area the size of North Carolina and South Carolina combined. Pine plantations are not actually forests at all. These trees are industrial row crops managed for the purpose of fiber production. They support 90 percent to 95 percent fewer species than natural forests, and they wreak havoc on surrounding ecosystems.

Given that deforestation is driven by a global appetite for forest products, can we use the marketplace creatively to protect the most vulnerable areas?

Absolutely. For example, NRDC and its local partners worked with Georgia Pacific -- one of the world’s leading manufacturers of tissue, packaging, paper, pulp, and building products -- to develop a policy that commits the company not to purchase trees from new pine plantations established at the expense of natural hardwood forests or from those that contain threatened, endangered, or vulnerable tree species, at-risk wildlife, or rare forest types. As a first step, GP worked with us to identify 11 such areas, totaling 600,000 acres, in the mid-Atlantic coastal region, as well as 90 million acres of natural hardwood forests in the South. Effecting change in the marketplace is not a panacea -- we still need strong regulations and effective government policies to protect the world’s forests -- but it is an important part of our toolkit.