Nebraska Legislature - Special Committee - Climate Change Seminar - Forestry

Scott Josiah Author

06/08/2016 Added

173 Plays

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Seminar on Climate Change for the Climate Change Seminar for Elected Officials of the Nebraska Legislature - Forestry

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[00:00:00.938]On this group so,
[00:00:03.222]maybe I'll just leave these with you.
[00:00:04.321]Okay.
[00:00:06.562]So you wouldn't have to take notes
[00:00:07.650]or anything like that.
[00:00:08.483]Let's see.
[00:00:11.330]Okay, so we had a round table,
[00:00:13.279]and we had 44 attendees from 28 different organizations.
[00:00:17.576]We were pretty pleased with the turnout,
[00:00:19.853]and they identified, as all the round tables did,
[00:00:22.505]key issues, primary mitigation
[00:00:25.190]and primary adaptation strategies,
[00:00:27.796]and then research, education and policy needs,
[00:00:31.035]all revolving around forestry and in that case,
[00:00:33.744]fire as well.
[00:00:35.860]So this is a blend of essentially the two reports,
[00:00:38.759]the round table results,
[00:00:40.335]as well as some background on forestry in Nebraska,
[00:00:44.011]because a lot of people don't
[00:00:45.524]know a lot about forests in Nebraska,
[00:00:47.411]and about one or two big issues, largely fire.
[00:00:53.005]So this is our forest.
[00:00:54.105]This is where our forests are.
[00:00:55.761]This is primarily an agricultural prairie state,
[00:00:59.049]but we do have 1.5 million acres of forest,
[00:01:02.358]and another 1.5 million acres of non-forest land with trees,
[00:01:06.902]and these are really important.
[00:01:08.144]These are your buffer systems along streams,
[00:01:10.468]these are your wind break systems,
[00:01:12.156]these are urban plantings.
[00:01:14.528]And those trees produce about a million and a half,
[00:01:17.113]this is 1.5 three times,
[00:01:19.439]1.5 million net tons of wood per year.
[00:01:22.612]That's net,
[00:01:23.604]that we're not really using much at all,
[00:01:25.986]so there's an opportunity there, economic opportunity.
[00:01:28.915]Right now these forestry sources
[00:01:32.582]support 2,200 jobs, and nearly $300 million
[00:01:36.202]in wood products are produced.
[00:01:37.805]Who knew that, in Nebraska?
[00:01:40.151]And our 13 million urban trees
[00:01:42.150]produce $120 million a year in environmental benefits,
[00:01:45.969]so these trees are important,
[00:01:47.997]forests are important in Nebraska.
[00:01:50.916]They're an important element of our agricultural systems,
[00:01:53.483]our ranching systems,
[00:01:55.618]and we need to consider them going forward.
[00:01:58.949]So the four, there was four issues really identified
[00:02:02.107]by the round table, and one was fire.
[00:02:06.501]That's a picture of the Pine Ridge Forest
[00:02:09.468]burning in 2012.
[00:02:11.699]Those are 200-foot flame heights.
[00:02:14.873]Pretty amazing behavior.
[00:02:17.273]That's the Pilger tornadoes,
[00:02:18.924]so the second issue is severe weather,
[00:02:22.239]which would include droughts and flooding as well.
[00:02:24.625]That's the 2011,
[00:02:26.100]uh, I guess I have a pointer here,
[00:02:30.655]yeah, that's the 2011 floods
[00:02:32.671]along the Missouri River.
[00:02:33.968](laughing)
[00:02:36.429]Not to confuse you.
[00:02:37.405]I gotta two fisted,
[00:02:39.642]and this here mountain pine beetle epidemic,
[00:02:42.465]this is not in Nebraska, obviously,
[00:02:43.778]but it did move into Nebraska
[00:02:46.284]in the 2011-2012 period.
[00:02:50.551]This killed 35 million acres of trees
[00:02:52.363]across North America,
[00:02:54.052]and that was purely climate change induced
[00:02:56.915]because we no longer have the cold temperatures
[00:02:59.020]in the winter to kill the bug off,
[00:03:01.032]so it moved into Nebraska for the first time,
[00:03:03.189]and it started killing trees in the Pine Ridge.
[00:03:05.231]I'm gonna run right through these.
[00:03:07.141]But the big one I want to talk about
[00:03:08.447]is catastrophic fire, 'cause it affects
[00:03:10.094]virtually the whole state.
[00:03:12.434]The fires now, we have trend data that shows
[00:03:15.452]that they're larger, they spread faster,
[00:03:18.077]they're more frequent, and they're more intense,
[00:03:21.371]and that's a combination of climate change
[00:03:23.211]and more fuel out there.
[00:03:26.068]We have increasing losses of life and property.
[00:03:28.454]We never used to lose buildings, now we do.
[00:03:31.117]People have died in these fires.
[00:03:33.110]State suppression capacity has been exceeded
[00:03:35.437]in these bad fire years.
[00:03:36.893]We don't have enough capacity in the state
[00:03:38.632]to deal with it.
[00:03:40.388]There's lots of areas that are a growing risk,
[00:03:42.996]and these areas are not coming back to trees.
[00:03:48.075]This is an interesting graph going back to 1964
[00:03:52.055]of fire currents by size class,
[00:03:54.381]and so from 1964 to about 1990,
[00:03:58.089]we only had one bad fire year.
[00:03:59.788]It was pretty normal.
[00:04:02.286]And then starting in 1990,
[00:04:03.849]they start getting closer together,
[00:04:05.758]more bad fire years, getting closer together
[00:04:08.135]until 2012 where we had by far,
[00:04:12.260]the worst fire year on record.
[00:04:15.459]These are the projections for the future
[00:04:17.186]is more years like 2012.
[00:04:20.223]So this is the Pine Ridge.
[00:04:21.556]This is a wake-up call to everybody.
[00:04:23.816]The Pine Ridge is an escarpment with pine trees,
[00:04:26.170]it's these dark areas right here.
[00:04:29.456]That's a very narrow band of Ponderosa pine trees.
[00:04:32.761]Most of this has burned in the last 25 years.
[00:04:36.464]In 1990 our inventory data said we had 250,000 acres.
[00:04:40.543]Now we have about 90,000 acres.
[00:04:43.669]We're two lightening strikes away from losing the rest.
[00:04:46.853]There's an unburned area here,
[00:04:49.109]and an unburned area here.
[00:04:50.593]The rest of these, the red was burned in 2012
[00:04:53.673]and the prior years are in the yellow.
[00:04:57.209]A lot of these are not coming back to trees.
[00:05:00.548]So again, it's just right here and right here,
[00:05:02.447]and that's an ecosystem that's at risk, here,
[00:05:05.702]and as well as a huge economic driver for that area.
[00:05:09.806]That's what it looks like from the air,
[00:05:11.536]so pretty complete destruction,
[00:05:13.761]impacts water, all sorts of things,
[00:05:17.114]economics, environmental and communities.
[00:05:20.211]This is 2006, the fire in Valentine.
[00:05:23.164]These are unprecedented for Nebraska.
[00:05:25.878]This burned right into town, into Valentine
[00:05:28.346]and took out I think 12 houses,
[00:05:30.963]right into the main part of town.
[00:05:36.292]Lots of communities at risk.
[00:05:38.431]This is Long Pine.
[00:05:39.540]It's at risk, the community's right here,
[00:05:43.725]so it's at risk from a lot of different directions.
[00:05:46.144]That's the fuel, it's Eastern Redcedar
[00:05:48.376]coming in under pine trees,
[00:05:50.390]and that's the fire in the Niobrara Valley in 2012,
[00:05:53.843]really not controllable.
[00:05:58.525]And I mention this, because Eastern Redcedar,
[00:06:01.063]it's not necessarily caused by climate change,
[00:06:04.661]but it is a factor that's compounding climate change,
[00:06:08.623]and we see this a lot in forestry issues.
[00:06:11.234]It's spreading across Nebraska exponentially.
[00:06:15.144]We now have 350,000 acres of Eastern Redcedar
[00:06:18.201]across the state.
[00:06:20.548]So some of the strategies and adaptation
[00:06:23.422]and mitigation strategies,
[00:06:25.159]they're all laid out in your report,
[00:06:27.500]but I just sort of will summarize them.
[00:06:30.125]There are things that we can do,
[00:06:31.425]and there are things that we are doing already,
[00:06:33.970]and we're really active in this.
[00:06:35.848]Of course we could do a lot more.
[00:06:39.427]We now have a single-engine air tanker
[00:06:42.607]that provides early, initial attack on these fires
[00:06:45.581]so that we keep them small,
[00:06:47.595]we keep them from getting into becoming these infernos,
[00:06:52.426]and we provide a lot of surplus property equipment
[00:06:55.516]to fire districts across the state.
[00:06:57.663]Wind breaks are a big deal.
[00:06:58.949]They were mentioned earlier.
[00:07:01.530]Two years of successive drought, really hard drought
[00:07:04.855]on non-irrigated land, that soil will begin to blow.
[00:07:08.983]It'll start moving around with the wind,
[00:07:11.759]and there's nothing to stop it.
[00:07:12.942]Wind breaks, many, many farmers and ranchers
[00:07:17.192]have been pulling out wind breaks,
[00:07:18.955]they're getting old, they're dated,
[00:07:21.336]they have bigger equipment, lots of reasons,
[00:07:25.502]but they depend on no-till systems,
[00:07:27.325]but if you don't have residue for two years in a row,
[00:07:30.285]you really can't protect that soil anymore.
[00:07:32.294]So wind breaks, we'd love to see wind breaks come back.
[00:07:36.697]We do a lot of fuels reduction,
[00:07:38.212]mechanically and then by prescribed burning
[00:07:41.050]to reduce the amount of fuel,
[00:07:42.253]to reduce the intensity of fires.
[00:07:44.393]And here's a big opportunity is urban plantings,
[00:07:47.430]planting better adapted plants to future conditions,
[00:07:50.840]not current conditions,
[00:07:52.924]which is kind of a guessing game, but also
[00:07:57.255]planting trees so that they reduce
[00:07:59.184]the heating and cooling loads of houses and buildings
[00:08:04.308]to reduce the amount of fossil fuels
[00:08:05.951]that go into heating and cooling those homes,
[00:08:07.702]so it's a double hit in a sense,
[00:08:10.383]or double savings.
[00:08:11.830]You're sequestering carbon in the trees
[00:08:14.107]and you're reducing fossil fuels.
[00:08:17.005]Some additional strategies,
[00:08:18.430]those are all in your book so I won't
[00:08:20.998]go into a lot of them, but
[00:08:23.186]build fire, storm and pest resistant landscapes
[00:08:26.266]and communities,
[00:08:28.587]expand tree planting,
[00:08:30.699]develop forest products markets,
[00:08:32.747]especially carbon markets, I think are a big one,
[00:08:36.496]and then developing a state-level firefighting force
[00:08:38.951]to suppress the larger fires.
[00:08:40.374]We don't have that in Nebraska.
[00:08:41.567]We're one of the few states that do not.
[00:08:44.586]Education, outreach and policy issues,
[00:08:48.632]inventory and monitor forest change.
[00:08:50.481]We need to do much better in terms of inventorying
[00:08:55.302]and monitoring our forests and how they're changing.
[00:08:57.989]We need to better understand the long-term impacts,
[00:09:01.426]ecologically, biologically, of climate change
[00:09:04.234]on our trees and forests.
[00:09:05.966]We don't really have a good sense
[00:09:07.791]of where this is taking our forest systems.
[00:09:10.463]We know we could lose the Pine Ridge,
[00:09:12.502]that's a big deal.
[00:09:13.959]We don't know how it's gonna affect
[00:09:16.102]our riperian systems, which are critical.
[00:09:20.427]Conduct vulnerability assessments.
[00:09:22.072]Which communities or ecosystems or tree species
[00:09:26.280]are most at risk?
[00:09:28.202]And we do have communities that are really at risk
[00:09:30.577]in virtually every legislative district in the state.
[00:09:36.674]So it involves figuring out what's most at risk
[00:09:39.857]and then developing strategies to protect those.
[00:09:42.967]And educate, engage
[00:09:44.857]folks like yourself, elected officials,
[00:09:46.642]land owners, home owners, the public
[00:09:49.186]to foster grassroots action,
[00:09:50.820]because this is a problem Rick mentioned,
[00:09:53.589]it affects everybody in some way.
[00:09:56.972]And then develop and adopt a comprehensive,
[00:09:59.255]partner-based climate action plan.
[00:10:01.564]That was a major recommendation of our round table.
[00:10:05.557]So summarizing, to me this is about
[00:10:08.225]a confluence of trends.
[00:10:09.664]We've got climate change,
[00:10:11.467]we've got more fuels on the forest
[00:10:13.886]that are leading to bigger fires.
[00:10:15.481]We're getting more frequent, higher temperatures,
[00:10:18.147]more frequent drought periods.
[00:10:22.229]It's all creating these kinds of issues.
[00:10:23.996]We've got emerald ash borer that I didn't even mention
[00:10:26.116]that's gonna kill another 44 million trees.
[00:10:29.153]So all these are coming together to really challenge
[00:10:32.571]and threaten our forest systems,
[00:10:35.554]and we really need to stay on top of this.
[00:10:38.281]So summarizing, we think,
[00:10:42.380]looking at the trend data that climate change
[00:10:44.306]is clearly interacting with and affecting negatively
[00:10:48.015]our forest systems,
[00:10:50.105]and it is projected to get worse.
[00:10:52.677]That's the first 2014 report,
[00:10:56.726]and we really need to be proactive,
[00:10:59.962]and take concrete steps to adapt to and mitigate
[00:11:03.206]the impacts of climate change on our trees and forests.
[00:11:07.787]So that's a summary of a nutshell.
[00:11:10.092]I don't know if I stayed, oh, pretty close.
[00:11:11.886]12 minutes.
[00:11:14.144]This is a picture actually of,
[00:11:16.187]that fire can be pretty at times, you know.
[00:11:19.347]This is 2012. (class titters)
[00:11:23.268]Senator.
[00:11:24.941]I was just number one,
[00:11:27.325]back on your slide with the blue
[00:11:29.657]about the expanding Redcedar,
[00:11:33.241]so can you explain why that,
[00:11:35.865]I'm not quite sure why it's bad,
[00:11:37.304]and also, can you just put in a little bug
[00:11:39.361]and explain to these insiders
[00:11:40.582]about the emerald ash borers, so
[00:11:43.462]people didn't quite catch,
[00:11:44.821]they didn't have to (clearing throat muffles speaker).
[00:11:48.086]We have a bill coming up next session again on that,
[00:11:51.357]so I think it's a good time while we have some (mumbles).
[00:11:54.766]Okay, so first question,
[00:11:58.505]Eastern Redcedar, the high concentrations,
[00:12:02.133]Eastern Redcedar is a native species,
[00:12:03.738]but because we don't really have
[00:12:06.135]a lot of a prescribed fire on the landscape,
[00:12:09.843]like we did 100-150 years ago,
[00:12:13.719]it's now, it's just spreading across the landscape,
[00:12:18.591]especially across grasslands
[00:12:20.087]and under existing forest, so
[00:12:22.421]concentrations are in the Niobrara Valley,
[00:12:25.043]in the central, less hills and
[00:12:28.543]less canyon area down in here.
[00:12:30.986]The blues are the highest intensity.
[00:12:33.172]This is the Hallsey planted forest.
[00:12:35.849]You can see it from satellite, there.
[00:12:37.860]But then you start to see all these greens and oranges
[00:12:40.289]and this is just a gradual spreading across the state,
[00:12:43.914]and this is a big deal, because this is,
[00:12:45.916]it affects grassland productivity,
[00:12:49.820]ecosystem health of grasslands and prairies,
[00:12:53.180]creates a huge fire issue,
[00:12:54.796]of which none of these fire departments
[00:12:57.056]in Eastern Nebraska have any experience with.
[00:12:59.850]So huge training issue, safety,
[00:13:01.553]life and property issues.
[00:13:03.941]Does that answer your question on that one?
[00:13:05.431]So emerald ash borer,
[00:13:07.489]introduced to Detroit,
[00:13:09.452]it's a tiny, small, kind of pretty insect
[00:13:12.691]that uniformly kills every ash species in North America.
[00:13:16.336]It was introduced from China into Detroit
[00:13:18.666]in 2002, think.
[00:13:21.211]So in 15 years or so, it's now in 25 states
[00:13:25.716]and several Canadian provinces.
[00:13:28.725]It's killed upwards of 20, 30, 40 million trees.
[00:13:32.863]I drove from here to New York and back last summer
[00:13:35.762]and it was continuous dead trees from Illinois
[00:13:38.855]all the way to the East Coast and back.
[00:13:41.334]It's a really big deal.
[00:13:42.608]We have 44 million ash trees in the state,
[00:13:45.594]a million in our communities
[00:13:47.183]and it'll cost $1 billion
[00:13:49.227]for the communities alone to deal with.
[00:13:51.720]So thank you for introducing that.
[00:13:54.729]Hopefully we'll get it through next year.
[00:13:58.604]Other questions?
[00:14:00.090]Sorry.
[00:14:00.923]No, go ahead.
[00:14:01.793]You know, I was curious about
[00:14:03.381]the cost of being proactive and going in
[00:14:05.776]and cleaning out some of the dead wood or thinning stands.
[00:14:08.195]Is that very expensive?
[00:14:11.188]And is that a feasible solution to most communities?
[00:14:16.408]It's yeah, I mean,
[00:14:18.377]it may be expensive, but it's the only feasible solution,
[00:14:22.112]otherwise it'll just burn up intensely,
[00:14:24.246]so we do about 5,000 acres a year,
[00:14:27.891]between three and 5,000 with federal dollars
[00:14:30.226]and some state dollars, and some landowner dollars.
[00:14:32.763]So we try to do it strategically across the landscape,
[00:14:37.035]around homes, around communities.
[00:14:43.374]Okay?

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Nebraska Legislature - Special Committee - Climate Change Seminar - Forestry

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