July 6, 2023

Please contact me if you find an error in the estimates! I’m always looking to refine my understanding and right now I am the author, copyeditor, and proofreader, so I might miss a thing or two.

<aside> 💡 This is a deep dive continuing from “Why forests, why now?” If you haven’t read that yet, it’s a good place to start.

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The Clark University Study on avoided deforestation in the northeast US by Dr. Christopher Williams, Dr Natalia Hasler, and Li Xi provided the foundational metrics for my analysis on the cost of replacing foregone sequestration and deforestation emissions.

State Estimates

I took the carbon emissions per year figure from the 2000s, multiplied it by 27 years, and then multiplied that product by 27/40 to get the proper attribution for 27-year deforestation emissions (through 2050). The logic behind this sequence is that the figures from the paper account for emissions over 40 years, which includes degradation of harvested wood products from deforestation. If I were to skip the step of multiplying the 27-year total annual emissions by 27/40, I would be improperly attributing an additional 13 years of emissions from the study’s calculations to emissions that occur in the 27-year period of interest. I would not have to take this step if I were looking at emissions and foregone rates through 2063. I apply the same process to the Foregone sequestration rates from the 2000s to get the 2050 lost removal.

Then it is simply a matter of summing the deforestation emissions and lost removal potential to get the total churned carbon removal expected by 2050. After that, it’s just some basic conversion from million-metric tons to metric tons, and pricing it at $100 per MT.

National Estimates

Using the EPA’s Greenhouse Gas Inventory Data Explorer, I downloaded the emissions tables for all sources and pulled the 2020 figure for annual Land Converted to Settlements. I calculate a very conservative estimate of the national annual emissions from forest converted to settlements by multiplying the land converted to settlements figure by the percentage of forest in the US to get a rough proportion of emissions from forests converted to settlements. Then I apply the same opportunity calculations as above, using the average (emissions / lost removal rate) from the northeast states to estimate the foregone emissions nationally. I expect further research into the real-world emissions opportunity will yield a larger figure due to forest biomass sequestering carbon at far higher rates than grassland, and my current inclusion of developed land in calculating the total forested land in the US. More refinement here to come…

To acquire very rough regional attributions, I then applied the output of the 27-year opportunity and price based on the percentage of forest (”Share Forest”) for each region per the USDA’s 2016 Forest Inventory and Analysis.