by Grant Canary, CEO of Mast Reforestation
Many of us learned in biology class that after a forest burns, it regrows. That’s changed. Today’s bigger, more severe fires kill vast amounts of trees and destroy seed sources, preventing many of those severely-burned forests from coming back.
If you’ve driven to a ski or hiking area and seen bare hillsides ten years after fire, it’s because natural regeneration hasn’t occurred and the manager of the land probably doesn’t have the means to reforest.
But one new approach to post-fire restoration, biomass burial combined with reforestation, offers a potentially lucrative option for land managers and a desperately needed source of capital to fund reforestation at scale. That combined approach also happens to generate high-quality carbon removal credits with attributes that align with top priorities for today’s voluntary carbon credit buyers: durability, additionality, and near-term retirability.
I’ve met many forest land managers–families, timber companies, tribal nations, conservation groups, and government agencies–affected by fire, and they all face the same dilemma: bad options. The first bad option: they can pay to reforest out of pocket, which is often several million dollars for several thousand acres.
They can try to sell the affected land, but that rarely offers any meaningful return, because the commercial and aesthetic value was in the trees. And for families and especially for tribal nations, there’s a connection to the land many are unwilling to sever. The third bad option is to do nothing and hope for natural regeneration–once a reliable course of action that’s now a bad bet.
Biomass Burial: A New, Win-Win Option for Post-Fire Forest Recovery and the Climate
The simple practice of burying fire-killed trees (biomass) in low-oxygen underground chambers offers a hugely promising solution for land managers and carbon removal. A peer-reviewed paper published in Nature Geoscience in June of this year made a strong case for biomass burial’s climate benefits. In the words of its lead author, Yiqi Luo, “This is the most effective and the least expensive, and possibly the most sustainable way to capture carbon. There’s huge potential.”
Biomass burial offers a straightforward approach that eliminates the fire hazard of dead trees and stores their carbon, removing it from the atmospheric cycle well beyond our lifetimes. Carbon credits generated by this removal pathway provide funding for burial as well as reforestation that otherwise couldn’t happen. Furthermore, the carbon credit buyer gets a credit they can retire that same year, not in decades. This approach also creates co-benefits from the new forests that are uncredited, as well as high-paying jobs to develop projects. The opportunity to deploy this solution is massive: regional studies estimate the carbon removal potential of post-fire biomass to be approximately 12 million tonnes of CO2 in the western regions of the U.S., including parts of Montana, Idaho and Washington.
A Scientifically-Proven Durable Climate Solution
When biomass is buried in the right anoxic conditions (no- or low-oxygen environments like clay soils), the carbon it contains stays there instead of turning into CO2 that’s emitted during decomposition or combustion. This carbon stays underground for 1,000 years or more, as shown by peer-reviewed research that examined a log buried in low-oxygen soils. Carbon dating found the log to be 3,775 years old and yet, it had lost only 5% of its carbon. Just to be clear how old this log is, it was around during Hammurabi and the first known written laws, and yet, I’ve seen samples from this log, and it looks like something from my yard.
Why Combining Biomass Burial and Reforestation Makes so Much Sense
Wildfires devastate both landscapes and local economies. Absent biomass burial, managing fire-killed trees is the biggest blocker and largest cost during post-fire reforestation. It requires a lot of expensive heavy equipment to remove the fire-killed trees. Once done, the most common disposal method is making giant piles and burning them to eliminate safety hazards–a costly and polluting practice.
Biomass burial creates new land management projects that need foresters, loggers, and heavy equipment operators. And burial keeps carbon out of the atmospheric cycle while reducing future fire risks by removing fuel–the fire-killed trees.
Relevant: California Advances Bill To Promote Biomass In Climate Strategy
A common question about this combined approach is, couldn’t something better be done with this biomass? In short, no. If there were a better disposal solution, land managers would be using it instead of piling and burning the fire-killed trees.
There are many climate-positive potential uses for waste biomass, from energy generation, to conversion to biochar for soils, to production of sustainable aviation fuel (SAF). At remote, rural forest sites that are often on rugged, mountainous terrain, these options are cost prohibitive due to the transport costs and/or infrastructure they require. Biomass burial, in contrast,takes place on or close to the site, making it feasible even in remote areas, and a source of revenue.
The Carbon Market Case for Biomass Burial with Reforestation
For companies striving to mitigate emissions from the most difficult parts of their supply chains, carbon credits generated from biomass burial offer a new opportunity that’s both affordable and scalable. As they search for the best products for their needs, many companies seek verified credits that meet three criteria: 1) durable carbon removal, 2) strong additionality, and 3) immediate applicability to net-zero goals. When integrated with reforestation projects, well-executed biomass burial can meet all three criteria while delivering numerous co-benefits, from habitat restoration to wildfire risk reduction.
For land managers, biomass burial combined with reforestation is an opportunity to restore forests at low cost and generate new revenue. The beautiful simplicity of biomass burial makes it worthy of broad adoption. Adoption of biomass burial frameworks by registries Puro and Isometric sent a strong signal to buyers that this new class of credits is worthy of integration into their portfolio strategies. The economic, climate, and environmental benefits of biomass burial and reforestation—to land managers, rural communities and carbon credit buyers—are too powerful to ignore.
Read more: New US Bill Seeks To Spur Biomass Carbon Removal With Targeted Tax Credit
