Background and Context

Natural and working lands are a potential carbon sink, but can also become a carbon source – due to agricultural practices, wildfire, land use conversion, ecosystem type conversion, or unsustainable timber harvests. The North Coast region has a high percentage of forested land. Avoiding the conversion of forest to other land use or land cover types, whether by development or by wildfire, and managing forests for carbon sequestration and storage is one of the most effective ways to ensure that forests remain net carbon sinks rather than becoming sources of GHG emissions. In addition to carbon sequestration and storage, forests provide wildlife habitat, water filtration, and recreational and economic opportunities for local communities. Historic western forest management practices, from clearcutting and plantation reforestation to fire suppression, and climate change impacts – including drought and insect infestations – have made forests less healthy and more vulnerable to destructive wildfires. Unhealthy, dense forests dominated by a single species lack biodiversity and sequester less carbon than healthy forests with species-rich ecosystems. Biodiverse forests protect traditional cultural resources and landscapes at risk from climate change.

Industrial agriculture is a major source of carbon emissions, with its high use of fossil-fuel powered machines, monocrops, and practices that mine the soil of carbon and other nutrients. Replacing nutrients with chemical fertilizer and spraying herbicides, pesticides, and fungicides to control unwanted species also contribute to industrial agriculture’s carbon emissions. By contrast, agroecology applies lessons from both western science and from traditional and Indigenous cropping systems from around the world to create more diversity, including multiple perennial species, multi-story cropping, grazing animals, use of cover crops and green manures, and other practices that support soil carbon and greater biodiversity than industrial agriculture. Restoration of pre-industrial agricultural and land management practices and research into new ways to grow crops more sustainably has led to potential improvements in agriculture practices, including carbon farming and agroforestry. Carbon farming seeks to maintain and increase the carbon stored in productive soils by minimizing tillage, using cover crops, and incorporating grazing animals, trees, or other perennial crops. Agroforestry incorporates trees along with other annual and perennial crops and grazing, creating diverse, multi-layered systems with increased biodiversity and stored carbon, both above and below ground. Agroforestry may provide an especially appropriate set of practices in areas designated as shaded fuel breaks or buffer areas around rural communities, and can provide both ecological and economic benefits to farmers and to community members. Potential benefits include food security, local biodiversity, carbon sequestration in soils and above-ground biomass, economic diversification for farmers, and cost-effective maintenance of defensible space around communities.

Climate change, drought, and pressure to reduce fossil fuels and agricultural chemicals that damage the environment make some currently farmed lands less viable for farming in the future. These lands could be remediated through a shift from intensive farming to carbon farming, incorporating practices that treat carbon sequestered in the soils as a crop and compensating farmers for “growing” carbon, through various market mechanisms, such as carbon credit or carbon offset programs. Abandoned or marginal agricultural lands are also excellent places for habitat restoration or afforestation, one of the best ways to sequester and store carbon.