How forests can help to feed the world

A new report shows how forests around the world can help eliminate malnutrition while fighting climate change.

Often, feeding the world’s growing population and protecting natural landscapes are pitted against one another. We know that much of the world’s deforestation, particularly in the tropics, is associated with the expansion of crops like palm oil and soy, as well as cattle and cocoa.

Yet a new report from the International Union of Forest Research Organizations shows that forests can play an important role in eliminating hunger and creating more food security. This is important, because protecting forests has been identified as a key and cost-effective means of fighting climate change. So, a better understanding of how forests help feed people may be another tool in the arsenal of their defense.

Over a billion people around the world experience chronic hunger, and twice as many suffer from periods of food insecurity. “Unfortunately, there is little current appreciation of the diverse ways in which these tree-based landscapes can supplement agricultural production systems in achieving global food security,” the authors write.

Read more: http://www.treehugger.com/green-food/how-forests-can-help-feed-the-world.html

New report highlights threat to future of forestry industry

by Michael Smith (Veshengro)

The future of the forestry industry in Scotland is under serious threat unless urgent action is taken to secure the long-term supply of timber, a leading industry figure has warned.

Stuart Goodall, Chief Executive of Confor: Promoting forestry and wood, said action had to be taken now to protect the 40,000 jobs supported by the forestry sector in Scotland, many of them in rural communities with few other large employers.

Speaking after the Forestry Commission (FC) produced its first-ever 50-year and 100-year timber supply forecasts, Mr Goodall said Confor had analysed the figures and concluded that a ‘trough' in supply of 60 million cubic metres of timber could cost Scotland more than 1000 jobs and mean that a chance to cut carbon emissions by 55 million tonnes would be missed.

Mr Goodall said: "Action has to be taken now to safeguard a Scottish success story and ensure our industry continues to thrive in in the long-term. That means hitting existing targets to plant 6000 hectares of commercial forestry every year until 2022 - and then maintaining that through to 2042. We cannot wait until it is too late. A failure to act will see a damaging drop in investment, inevitably leading to job losses - and will make it exceptionally difficult for Scotland to meet its carbon reduction targets."

He added: "The regular 25-year FC forecasts were really helpful - but the life cycle of a softwood tree is more like 35-50 years, so we needed a longer view of where timber supply was heading. Confor feared a falling away of supply in the 30-40 year timeframe, which is why we asked for a 50-year and a 100-year forecast to be prepared. Security of supply is everything in a long-term industry like forestry - that's what the big companies in Scotland, like James Jones, Norbord and Glennons, look at when deciding on future investment."

Currently, the sector is confident, with timber supply at a record high - but Mr Goodall added: "Beyond the 25-year forecast, a gentle rise in availability gives way to a steeper fall - as a result of the falling of commercial planting in the last few years. That's why we analyzed the long-term figures and their impact - and our findings are a serious cause for concern."

Mr Goodall called on the Scottish Government to fulfill its commitment to plant 60,000 hectares of commercial forestry by 2022 - and to further commit to planting 6,000 hectares a year until 2042: "If that happens, we have estimated that 1000 jobs will be secured and 55 million tonnes of carbon can be saved - and the virtuous cycle of economic and environmental benefit will continue. Forestry is an exceptionally important business sector - as well as 40,000 jobs, it adds around £1.7 billion in value to Scotland's economy every year. Increasing domestic planting can also make a hugely positive impact on the balance of payments by reducing imports."

Tom Bruce Jones, a Confor board member and joint Managing Director of Scotland's leading sawmiller James Jones & Sons, said: "The fall-off in supply might seem far away, but we have to act now to secure a successful industry for the future. There is a big problem coming over the horizon - and it wasn't covered by the existing forecast. By the time the traditional cycle of 25-year forecasts had identified this problem, it would have been too late to do anything about it."

Mr Bruce Jones, whose company has substantial operations in Lockerbie, Moray and Angus, added: "We have to start tackling the challenges that are affecting planting rates and to ensure more trees are going into the ground right now. We also need to ensure we are replanting our forests after they are harvested. That will give businesses like ours confidence to keep investing.

"Forestry in Scotland is currently a great success story - so let's to keep it that way. A sustainable timber supply creates long-term investment, which is good for the economy and jobs, good for the environment - and good for Scotland."

Confor has already campaigned successfully in a number of areas: securing a fair balance of grants for planting commercial and non-commercial woodland; speeding up applications for new planting; securing additional Scottish Government funding for new planting; and ensuring existing woodlands removed in the event of disease or for wind farms are re-planted elsewhere.

But Mr Bruce Jones said there was still much to do: "We have to commit to keep planting - it's a simple as that. The industry is in great shape but a failure to act now means that by the time the problem is staring us in the face, it is too late."

The report, the ‘50-Year Forecast of Softwood Availability', is part of the National Forest Inventory. (NFI) It can be downloaded from the Forestry Commission website: www.forestry.gov.uk/inventory

While softwood is one thing, as far as forestry and timber is concerned, what we must look at much more, however, in the UK, and elsewhere, is to bring broadleaved hardwood production back into our woods and forests and especially the practice of coppicing.

But, then again, the Forestry Commission was never designed and created to do that. Its job was the creation, originally, of timber for pits and the war effort and not much seems to have changed in their way of thinking, as softwood is still the main concentration point for their work, it would seem.

Softwood, though not in the regimented plantations either, is fine and good on grounds where other trees may not grow too well but a good mix must be created rather than the monocultures that not only look ugly and are almost devoid of life on the forest floor but which also are susceptible to all manner of diseases.

What forestry and woodland management needs in Britain, including Scotland, is a serious rethink and a new way of doing things which, in fact, is not a new way but a very old one.

© 2014

Wood

by Michael Smith (Veshengro)

Wood is a most important raw material and the best part of it is that it is growing naturally and therefore is always renewable.

Wood was most important once as almost everything was made from wood and the wood came – primarily – from coppice operations, the most sustainable woodland management system known to man.

Today plastic has replaced wood for many products once made from this raw material much to the detriment of not only forest industries but also the forest itself.

On the positive side, however, slowly people are, once again, coming back to value wood and treen goods and that also and especially goes for wood in the kitchen. In fact, wood is more hygienic and much healthier to use in the kitchen and in conjunction with food than plastic will ever be.

But plastic was made out to be a material of almost magic value, properties, qualities and much more though nothing could be further from the truth.

Alas the woodsman himself often falls for this looking for the handles of his tools to be of fiberglass and plastic rather than of wood believing them to be stronger. Another fallacy.

All too often we find axes, hatchets and billhooks with plastics (ABS) or carbon fiber handles which – one – also can break and – two – the way tools are made to join with the handles means that, should the handles break the tools themselves have to be – more often than not – thrown away as no new shafts can be fitted to the head. But I digressed.

Wood, while indeed often heavier, is a much superior choice and not just in the kitchen and for tool handles over plastic (or other materials).

Walking sticks and hiking staffs crafted from wood will outperform and outlast those newfangled plastic or aluminum ones each and every time. Having had more than one kind of those – even an expensive brand – collapse and break on me in use, I can vouch for that, as my wooden ones stood up to the same use and even more without any problems.

Going by the amount of those newfangled high-tech hiking staffs that end up broken in the litter bins on mountains, hills and in parks it would appear that I am not the only one who has had bad experience with those.

Coppice management of woodlands actually enhances biodiversity and creates new growth with much higher carbon sequestration than that of old trees that have reached the end of their productive lives.

A single standard tree lives – productively – for between 30 to 140 years – depending on the species – while a coppice stool, properly managed, renewing itself depending on the management cycle between 7 to 20 years will live – productively – for thousands of years. Trust me, I am a forester. But back to wood as a material.

As a raw material from which to make things wood is – more often than not – superior to man-made materials and the fact that it is natural and at the end of its life can go back into the cycle of Nature is but one, though important, point.

Wood can also be fashioned into so many objects and products with often but simple hand tools and that is the reason it was so extensively made use of in the days of old, aside from the fact that plastics, for instance, did not exist back then.

The advent of plastics saw the decline of many of the products that were previously made from wood (and other natural materials) such as baskets, as they could be produced much cheaper in plastic than could be wooden hand-made ones and the same goes for other products too, such as kitchen utensils, garden trugs, etc.

Britain's industrial revolution was not fueled by coal dug from out of the ground but by charcoal from coppice woodlands and almost all wood products bar the ships of the navies, both Royal and merchant, were made predominately from wood that came from those woodlands. Depending on the rotation cycle of coppicing even large beams and planks can be milled from the trunks of the trees.

Wood is – obviously – a natural material that, unlike man-made ones, such as plastic, is biodegradable even in an ordinary compost heap when the product has come to the end of its life. Until such a time, however, any wooden product keeps the carbon dioxide locked up that the tree has absorbed during the time that it grew.

The best way to dispose of wood – a wooden product – at the end of its (useful) life, unless it is possible to reuse the wood for something else, is to burn it, ideally in a stove for heat. Burning only sets free the CO2 the wood has absorbed while the process of composting it also releases methane, on top of carbon dioxide, during the decaying process, and methane is a greenhouse gas that is between 20 to 40 times more dangerous than CO2.

I love wood and wooden products but then, as said before, I could be seen very much as biased being a forester, a woodsman, by original trade. Wood is extremely tactile, as is leather, and most pleasing to the eye.

Wood and leather, though the latter is not really the subject matter here, are seen by many in the “green movement” as something rather not to use as the former “harms trees” and the latter “harms animals”. The alternatives, however, are materials which in themselves, in the production and in their disposal, harm the Planet.

© 2014