Procurement

Download the Climate Smart Wood Group Procurement Guidance PDF

Why Climate Smart Wood?

Forests — both managed and protected — have the potential to be powerful climate solutions. To keep global warming under 1.5 degrees Celsius, we need to protect intact forests, restore degraded forests, plant new forests and improve the ways that working forests are managed.

Unless it’s recycled, reclaimed, or salvaged, climate-smart wood (CSW) comes from climate-smart forestry (CSF). In working forests, CSF increases ecological resilience in the face of climate change and sequesters and stores more carbon over time compared to conventional practices. The net effect of CSF is to reduce greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere and enhance the health of forests and the multiple values they deliver.

There is a spectrum of forest management from more to less climate smart, not an either-or distinction. CSF generally entails ongoing improvements over conventional practices without a fixed end point, as understanding of climate adaptation and forest dynamics evolves. It also involves achieving additional climate benefits beyond minimum regulatory requirements.

CSF promotes a wide array of services and goods, including local economic vitality, watershed protection, biodiversity, and the production of wood and fiber. CSF also addresses issues of equity and climate justice, fostering community engagement and respecting the rights of Indigenous Peoples.

Examples of CSF may include:

• Reducing the average size of harvest openings, increasing live-tree retention (trees that are left behind after logging), and lengthening harvest rotations (the length of time between harvests).
• Managing for a diversity of tree sizes, ages, and native species that make up multiple forest conditions and habitats.
• Thinning unnaturally dense and fire-prone forest stands, and restoring the capacity to withstand natural disturbances using prescribed fire and other means.
• Protecting water quality and aquatic habitat with ecologically appropriate buffers along streams and around wetlands.
• Reducing greenhouse gas emissions and biodiversity impacts associated with forest management and the application of chemical fertilizers, herbicides, and pesticides.
• Protecting high conservation values in forests, including but not limited to old growth, and protecting and restoring habitat for imperiled, threatened and endangered species.
• Understanding, respecting, and upholding the rights and sovereignty of tribal nations and Indigenous peoples through early and ongoing consultation and co-stewardship of cultural and natural resources.
• Ensuring communities most impacted by forestry activities have a meaningful voice in decision-making and benefit equitably from the outputs derived from them.

For more information contact the Climate Smart Wood Group at info@climatesmartwood.net.