G4.3 Land use emissions
Include emissions from land use change in future emissions inventories.
Trees
ICLEI now has a protocol for estimating emissions from local forests and urban trees to add to the protocols that we’ve been using for our climate plan emissions inventory. (It’s Appendix J in Version 1.2) (They used Whatcom County as one of the pilot test cases…)
The Forest Service and American Forests maintain software for assessing county forests – iTree County. It has an interactive map interface that provides their estimates for a variety of benefits from forests by county, including current carbon storage and current annual sequestration in CO2 equivalents. (They describe the methods for the analysis in the References.) They estimate that forests in the county are currently sequestering the equivalent of 649,000 metric tons of CO2 each year, and are storing the equivalent of about 43,322,000 tonnes. This sequestration is roughly 22% of our inventoried annual emissions. (Since the EPA estimates the tailpipe emissions from an average passenger car at 4.6 metric tons a year, it’s also about the equivalent of taking 141,000 cars off the road.)