RESOURCES: Uses of federal lands to reduce carbon emissions require new policy -- study

Gayathri Vaidyanathan, E&E reporter
Climatewire.com

A comprehensive public land management policy is needed to decide the uses of millions of acres of federal land in a future low-carbon economy, according to a paper released by Duke University.

Public lands can be used to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from the atmosphere, but such efforts will require a new coordinated effort between government agencies that own the different parcels of land, according to the paper.

"There is a lot of attention being paid to climate policy, but there's a gap in addressing this segment of land under public ownership," said Christopher Galik, a co-author of the paper and research coordinator at the Climate Change Policy Partnership at Duke University.

The study discusses roles for commercially unused lands in a low-carbon economy. It states that the public ownership of these lands would make them important for achieving climate policy objectives.

"The sheer magnitude of renewable energy resources and greenhouse gas mitigation potential embodied in public lands requires that they be considered as part of any economy-wide climate policy solution," states the paper.

There is about 650 million acres of federal lands in the United States. Much of that already has uses assigned to it, such as endangered species preservation, recreation, grazing, and energy extraction.

But it also presents opportunities to remove carbon from the atmosphere by carbon sequestration beneath the ground, reforesting, renewable energy production and other methods. Forested land has the potential to act as a carbon sink. The paper states that as of 2002, public forests contained an estimated 10.3 gigatons of carbon, which comes to 43 percent of the total U.S. carbon contained in forests.

Fractured ownership may be an obstacle

But CO2 mitigation goals should not conflict with existing uses for the public lands, said Galik.

"There is an issue with coordination because of fractured ownership and management," he said. This would be the ideal time to address the coordination aspect, with the current climate policy debate winding through Congress, he said. Energy legislation or a public lands omnibus bill could provide opportunities to address the inefficient public land management system, he said.

Some of the questions that will arise from potential climate-related uses will include the sale of carbon offsets generated from the land within private markets, and who might develop these lands for activities such as carbon sequestration.

"The introduction or expansion of low-carbon policy objectives could benefit from agency-, interagency-, or Congressional-level guidance on the relative priority of actions," states the report.

There is also a need for better data acquisition to assist in planning and gauging the impact of climate change on the nation's ecosystems, which invariably includes public lands, according to the paper.

"The overall objective is to spur discussion," said Galik. It is better to start talking about problems before legislation is introduced rather than after, he said.