 Hi everybody. Welcome to our briefing today. I'm Dan Berset. I'm the President of the Environmental Energy Study Institute. And this is our fourth briefing in a five-part series, Farm Bill in Focus. And today, our look at the Farm Bill continues with the future of forestry in the Farm Bill. And I'd like to say a very special thanks right at the top to the Office of Representative Buddy Carter for helping us secure this great space today. And he'll be joining us via video remarks in just a moment as well. Representative Carter and your great staff for helping us have a great conversation about forestry in the Farm Bill. Our briefing today is very proudly presented in partnership with our friends at U.S. Nature for Climate. Let me tell you a little bit about this great organization. U.S. Nature for Climate is a coalition of 26 organizations dedicated to advancing implementation of natural climate solutions in the United States. Coalition members represent a wide variety of sectors, including organizations focused on conservation, agriculture, forestry, sustainable business, outdoor recreation, and our oceans and coastlines. And together, this coalition is raising awareness of the numerous economic, health, and environmental benefits provided by natural climate solutions and ensuring that the potential of America's natural and working lands are fully integrated into border climate action efforts. If you'd like to learn more about U.S. Nature for Climate, I encourage you to check them out online at www.usnatureforclimate.org. They are great partners, and we're very pleased to once again work with them to bring a briefing to Capitol Hill. About EESI. EESI was founded in 1984 on a bipartisan basis by members of Congress to specifically provide educational resources about climate change topics to policymakers. Originally, we were focused on environmental and energy, and then in 1988, we brought in our focus to climate change. Today, we do all sorts of great congressional education programming like briefings. We also do a lot of writing. We do articles, fact sheets, issue briefs. We have a really tremendous stable of Farm Bill side-by-sides that are available on our Farm Bill Resources page. We have a climate solutions map so you can look up what's happening in your state to get specifically solutions-oriented information about what's going on across the country. We also have a hearing tracker going all the way back to the beginning of the 117th Congress, so if you are looking for a very easy way to keep up with hearings, especially related to the Farm Bill with climate focus, we have a great resource to help you do that. We also over time have developed some expertise working with rural utilities to access USDA programs and provide inclusive financing to their customers. And so Farm Bill is something that we care about from a policy perspective, but we also see firsthand how investments in rural America benefit the country in general, and really are critical if we're going to decarbonize the entire economy in order to advance climate solutions. We have, I mentioned the briefings. We have a great newsletter. It comes out every other Tuesday. If you haven't already subscribed to Climate Change Solutions, I encourage you to do that. The best way you can do that is to visit us online at www.eesi.org. I mentioned the fact sheets. We're also on social media. I mentioned this is the fourth of our briefings. We've also done one on the process. So if you're new to the Farm Bill, which many of you are, we have a great briefing about that. It's also a great briefing for ideas about how you can help your boss engage in the Farm Bill productively. And I know there's some big deadlines coming up this week in the House in terms of member requests and member priorities and things like that. We also did one on what we called Climate Economic and Environmental Win-Win-Wins. That was briefing number two. Briefing number three was two weeks ago that was on rural development. And then we're back two weeks from today on June 21st to talk about conservation. But we do more than just Farm Bill. We also did a recent briefing with the Department of Energy on the Office of Nuclear Energy Programs. We did one, again, with DOE, with the Office of Energy Efficiency Renewable Energy. We did a briefing about organics and agriculture with our friends at Natural Resources Defense Council. We did Congressional Climate Camp for the first couple months of the year. And our last briefing really focused on implementation of the IRA and IAJ. We did a lot of great stuff and pretty much I challenged anyone to kind of say, well, what's a climate change topic or to come up with a climate change topic that we don't have a resource from the last year or two. And because I bet we do. And if we don't, hello, Aliyah. It's great to see you. Aliyah was on our rural development panel. She's with National Cooperative Business Association. And I am always, it's always just so nice to see Aliyah. So hi, how's it going? She did a great job. And so I definitely encourage you to visit us online and watch that briefing because all of these briefings are livecast. Climate friendly forestry, excuse me, can provide multiple benefits including greenhouse gas emissions reductions, enhanced resilience to wildfires and extreme heat, innovation in materials and practices, and economic development opportunities in rural communities. Our panelists today will describe forestry related programs in the Farm Bill and discuss essential topics like wildfire management, wood products, carbon markets, and urban forestry. Let me just click through. I always forget to click. There's our Farm Bill stuff. Look all this cool stuff. That's the hearing tracker. Those are the side by side by side. So this is going to be great if you're tracking, we have about 20 or so of these that are either online or coming online. We're comparing the existing Farm Bill, so the existing law, with what the House and the Senate produce. And we'll use formatting so you can make quick comparisons between what the House and Senate are proposing and also how those are different. Because eventually the Farm Bill will likely be resolved in conference. And so the differences between what the two chambers are working on is just as important as the difference between what they're proposing and how that compares with the existing law. There are Farm Bill series. Oh, that's too far. Okay. Wait. Yeah. Okay. So let me end there and introduce our first speaker who's joining us via video recording. And that is Representative Earl L. Buddy Carter. Representative Carter represents the first district of Georgia and Congress. He's an experienced businessman, healthcare professional, and faithful public servant. Before being elected to Congress, he served as the mayor of Poole, Georgia, and in the Georgia General Assembly, where he used his business experience to make government more efficient and responsive to the people. Today Representative Carter serves on the House Energy and Commerce Committee and the House Budget Committee. And we're really, really happy to have him join us and share some thoughts about forestry. Take it away. Good afternoon and thank you to the Environmental and Energy Study Institute for holding this briefing today on an incredibly important topic. Forestry is something that is near and dear to my heart because I've had the honor and privilege of representing Georgia, the number one forestry state in the nation as a member of Congress. That's right. Georgia is the number one forestry state in the country. Georgia has 22 million acres of commercially available private timberland more than any other state. Georgia tops every other state in the nation in terms of pure volume of timber harvested, all while overall tree volume in Georgia has been net increasing since 1953. We're incredibly proud of this in Georgia. In fact, one of my favorite sayings in South Georgia is when you breathe fresh air, get on your knees and thank the farmer who grew the trees. Forest of all kinds on private land or on federally protected land are vital to our environment and our economy. It is proposed that a single large tree can provide a day's supply of oxygen for up to four people. At the same time, that tree is pulling carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and storing it in its fibers. That carbon dioxide stays within that tree and whatever product it ends up going into. Factor in the other benefits that forests provide by filtering water, providing habitats to wildlife and more. And you can quickly see that forests are essential and must be protected, especially as we start to craft a farm bill. Forest landowners face immense financial burdens planning and maintaining their land. These pressures are made worse when a natural disaster occurs and destroys an investment that takes 20 years or more to come to fruition. We need to ensure that forest landowners are not unfairly punished by our tax code when disasters occur and private forest owners discover that their ability to claim a casualty loss for destroyed timber is limited, often to zero dollars. That's why I hope to see a fix to the casualty loss issue, which will provide an immediate and permanent solution for forest landowners to keep their forest working a vital part of rural economies. Otherwise, I fear we will see fewer and fewer landowners using their land for forest and turn to other kinds of developments that, unfortunately, don't provide the environmental benefits forests do. Also, we should ensure we are getting the best data available on our forest through the forest's inventory analysis. FIA data is a critical tool for forest landowners, especially as forest carbon markets become increasingly important. I'd like to thank the panelists for their participation today and hope everyone leaves with the knowledge of what we can do through the farm bill to maintain our forest. Thank you and God bless. Great. Thank you, Representative Carter. That was a great introduction to the topic today. Before we turn to our panel, I just want to remind everyone that after our discussion, we will have a question and answer period and that question and answer period will be rooted in the presentations that you're about to see. So we'll be branching out into all sorts of forestry topics. So whatever you do, don't leave too soon and that concludes the pun portion of the program today. More seriously, for our online audience, and we have a robust online audience today, if you have a question, you can ask it by sending us an email. The email address to use is ask at EESI.org. That's ASK at EESI.org. You're getting a preview of Dan O's file management system, so that's a treat. You can also follow us on social media at EESI online. We will do our best to incorporate questions we get from our online audience into the discussion. And we will have a microphone in the room, so our in-person audience today, which is likewise robust, will also have an opportunity to take questions for our panelists. Lauren Cooper is our first panelist today. Lauren is the Chief Conservation Officer at the Sustainable Forestry Initiative. There, she leads the conservation pillar and provides conservation leadership internally as well as externally to SFI's network of resource professionals, landowners, educators, local communities, indigenous peoples, and governments. Lauren founded the Forest Carbon and Climate Program at Michigan State University. She has international experience working with indigenous communities in Peru, Mexico, Ecuador, and the U.S. She has served as a steering committee member on both the Women's Forest Congress and the Forest Climate Working Group and co-chaired the National and Working Lands Group for the Michigan Council on Climate Solutions. Lauren, it is great to have you on our panel today. I'm looking forward to your presentation. Well, thanks so much, Jan. And I want to start off with just a quick acknowledgement. It's wonderful to be here and to see everyone. Thanks to all of you for coming. It's really nice to have an opportunity to present in person. And again, I wanted to thank Representative Carter for the support and the opening words here because there's a lot of alignment with what I'm going to present. It actually probably saved me a little time because I don't have to repeat all of those points. And thanks to my colleagues on the panel with me. I'm looking forward to hearing their presentations as well. So to get started, so again, I'm Lauren Cooper and I lead the, again, I'm the Chief Conservation Officer at the Sustainable Forestry Initiative. And if you're not familiar, we are a large and diverse organization that does a lot of work on education. We have a large education body, but we also have standards and certify sustainable practices across a very large footprint in North America, 350 million acres. And so my time today, I'm going to provide a basic science introduction because as my other introduction said, I have about 10 years coming from academia where I've worked in science synthesis and communicating the core principles of forest and climate change to various audiences. So if you're interested in learning more, there's tons of resources in that program as well and I'll have some slides coming from my team there as well. I'm going to start off with a science introduction. I'm then going to talk about solutions to some of the challenges I present and then make some direct linkages to the Farm Bill. This is a way to visualize, this may be familiar to you, but this is one of our options to visualize the addressing climate change. So one of the challenges, we have basically here historical emissions going into the future and a very concerning trend as we all know that climate change is already affecting us and we have a hazy day in Washington D.C. unfortunately due to a pretty horrendous fire situation unfolding in Canada right now. And the idea here is we have the black line is our ongoing emissions but we want to get down here to this green line to avoid catastrophic climate impacts. A lot of the efforts need to involve reducing our fossil fuel use but this green line here is this idea of natural climate solutions or nature based solutions. There's different terms but it's the same idea. That must also be undertaken to address climate change. So this is not an either or this is on all fronts addressing climate change. The exciting thing about natural climate solutions is there's a lot of co-benefits or additional benefits from undertaking these and I'll get into those in a moment but over here this pie chart is breaking down what this green line looks like. So what are the natural climate solutions? And my next slide will show them in more detail but just to give you a sense of if you were to break these down further both this large green and this blue one are related to forestry and there even are some other ones. And so I'll show you on the next slide in a little more detail just how important forestry and forest practices are out of the total of nature based solutions and that's certainly not to minimize these are also very important activities and other aspects of agricultural we would call these natural and working lands but very unique and really widespread opportunities in trees and forests. You can see the reforest opportunity is really literally off the chart in this case and it's because many of us reside in places that used to have more trees and so there's an opportunity for restoration, reforestation and so this is just to give you a sense of what these solutions look like and what a nature based solution is. And so when we look at the challenge of climate change and we're considering nature based solutions I want to introduce these in a little more detail. There's different ways to cut this or to communicate about these ideas but I like this approach where maybe taking it as three major tactics that you can undertake. The first is increase or maintain your forest land so they actually extend to the geography maintain or increase your carbon stocks you could be making sure your forests are healthy maybe undertaking activities to increase carbon in places where it's appropriate to do so and then the last one is increasing sustainable wood use and I'll explain a little more of each of these and give a quick example. So in terms of increasing or maintaining forest land the concern here is that we have a lot of development pressure as we just heard from Representative Carter a concern of how do we maintain the value of our forest so that we are maintaining the forest extent that we currently have and the US has not had a lot of deforestation we're actually losing forests in recent decades but those projections are changing and it does depend on your state and where you are of course but some projections are that we could lose up to 3% of our forests by 2050 on the current trajectories that we are and this is really across multiple types of landholders including private Timberland areas and then there's also big restoration opportunities we have also had fires here in the United States some of them are so severe that without interventions they will not be forests or they would take a very very long time to recover so that's really a loss of our forest extent as well if we allow that to happen and so there's many opportunities across all land to owner types and even in our urban landscapes and so these tactics are avoiding conversion reforestation and afforestation and afforestation is the idea of adding trees in a place that has not been forested recently so if you had an abandoned ag area in the Midwest that has not been forested for 150 years and we plant trees on that we would call that afforestation and so one of the solutions to this is bolstering demand for working forests this is an effort called keeping forests as forests we do make a lot of decisions driven by economics and so having markets for materials is very important and minimizing incentives to develop about maximizing incentives to keep forests keep them healthy, keep them valuable and making that attractive to landowners is one of the solutions going back to the maintaining or increasing carbon stocks these are largely considered very cost effective opportunities they can be scaled rapidly across with current landowners and reforestation can be pricey and expensive but there's a lot of approaches in here which is increasing resilience or undertaking strategies to allow trees to get older for example where they would store more carbon than otherwise and so there's a range of tactics that could be appropriate for different landowners and in different areas and these could include improving your forest management there's opportunities in agroforestry so adding trees to agricultural landscapes or urban forestry adapting to climate change is another one making sure we're not losing that carbon in the future even if you maintain your forest extent if you have a lot of disturbance is what we would call it something that negatively impacts trees and forests you'll lose carbon if your trees start dying and so this is the idea of climate change as a threat multiplier so there's lots of opportunities in the Farm Bill for example to think about these are words like resilience or adaptation that look and consider how can we make sure our forests are healthy into the future unfortunately we don't have the luxury of thinking about sustainability and the way that maybe foresters did 40 years ago because we're in a changing situation and so we need to think about how these dynamics are changing and unfortunately how they're overlapping so in some areas you have we have something called oak decline is one example where at first almost inexplicably large oak trees were dying and there's the theory now that it's because of these multiple pressures that are coming together changes in the raining cycle increased drought other times that's just changing the pressure and it's actually causing mortality of trees and then what we also see is then when you add fire risk on it you end up having catastrophic fires or pests that are surviving winters in places they wouldn't otherwise and so there's this kind of a complexity in the forestry space there's lots of opportunity to ensure that the Farm Bill is supporting people that are working on these types of topics and can make the interventions necessary and then the final one is sustainable wood use and so the primary approaches here we heard from Representative Carter that our trees store carbon and so when you use wood products they're actually storing that carbon and so sometimes it can seem like we're talking about something kind of abstract with gases and then there's trees absorbing carbon but it's actually quite physical like if you have a log that you're about to throw on a fire it's dried out and you weight it it's about 50% carbon and that's actually CO2 that came from the atmosphere through photosynthesis and is broken down in the process of developing sugars for the tree processing but it also takes that material into its physical structure so that's how trees hold carbon so when you see this woody material it's actually storing carbon throughout as long as it's in that woody material form and then also though wood is a lower emission material compared to steel, plastics and concrete so when we're substituting for trees which are a natural resource and a renewable resource we're reducing those other emissions and I have an example of that on my next slide also there's opportunities in energy production so co-firing woody waste materials or woody materials with natural gas for example and then one thing I always like to point out though is there's lots of opportunity for innovation inefficiency improvements we have a lot of inefficiencies in our economy overall we don't use materials for as long as we should we're not making connections to recycle materials as much as we should so I want to point that out that this is part of the wood utilization opportunity and the farm bill can certainly support this type of innovation and then just quickly here's an example of a mass timber building that was built in Michigan it's the first one in Michigan on MSU's campus that used it's called mass timber construction and so it uses this in place of steel and concrete and it's storing carbon now within this building and it also was built faster and with fewer emissions than if it had traditional building materials so this is an exciting place and there's lots of connections to the farm bill and wood innovation and so for my last section here I wanted to talk about taking action and so what does an ambitious policy agenda look like but with safeguards to ensure that we are not causing unintentional harm and negative consequences so one of the big ideas that I wanted to talk about and touch on is this idea of a transformational bioeconomy so climate change is a very complicated big challenge and we have been approaching it in various ways but really I would suggest thinking about this in a really ambitious way that we need to fundamentally change the materials that we're using how we're using them and this has effects for jobs employment but the great thing about forestry has a lot of other benefits so you look at forests there's climate regulation there's water filtration there's flood protection there's a lot of adaptation benefits as well so forests are a very holistic way to think about supporting our economy and can be a really great place to invest in a transformation that will be supportive to employment and to our natural landscapes going into the future and so I wanted to list out just some specific strategies here for the Farm Bill and start off with one key point is that there are some really wonderful expert organizations and coalitions that provide focus recommendations forest climate working group that I've been heavily involved in for last more than a handful of years that puts out more high level policy recommendations but there's also a forest and the Farm Bill coalition that provides very detailed recommendations and a really great diverse group of actors involved in that so I just want to make sure I mention that and so some of these types of topics you'll see them in these types of recommendations but there's opportunities to focus on forest management so this is restoration reducing fire risk having partnerships across jurisdictions so things like the good neighbor authority also across private lands and then protecting forest lands from conversion we also have the research community so this is federal private academia and supporting the FIA the forest inventory and analysis program that creates data that the research community can use to understand trends and make recommendations for management also again advancing markets for forest and forest products so this includes traditional products like wood and fiber but also non-traditional products in new markets like carbon and biodiversity credits water and non timber forest products so diversifying the options for landowners to be able to make the economic rationale to keep their forests and to have enough resources to manage those forests to reduce risks of climate harm for example for fire risk and again reducing or increasing efficiency and reducing waste workforce development is a huge topic and what's really exciting about forestry is these are distributed jobs they're across the rural landscapes everything from forest management to manufacturing in the built environment increase in urban forestry lots of innovation for materials everything from glues to foams replacing materials I know the auto industry is looking at and exploring replacing a lot of traditional fossil fuel based materials with tree based materials so very exciting space in here and this is a publication from SFI it's a journey of black professionals and really looking at how do we diversify not only the workforce but diversify who's joining that workforce as part of this economic transformation that's really needed and then finally questions of equity and social justice in urban and community forestry and how climate is going to negatively affect certain well all of us but certain segments of the population more than others and making sure that we're holistically engaging and addressing that now and then I wanted to quickly touch on this idea of best practices so we can move boldly but there's also tradeoffs when you force our complex and so there can be negative impacts and we also have a co-occurring global biodiversity crisis so safeguards are actions we can take to assess the potential harm and then take steps to minimize that harm and one of the cool things about forestry is I have this scale here because this is from a paper that I have published that talks about how in forestry though we have these indicators that they can be negative but they could also be positive so biodiversity is when you don't want to have a negative impact but with that same indicator you may be having a positive impact and so it's not just risk mitigation there's also great benefits but the key is identifying what those indicators are and I was just going to quickly touch on two tools for safeguarding and for providing the guidelines of best practices so it was just approved last month we have at SFI a new and it's the first of its kind urban and community forestry sustainability standard which really lays out what those good practices are in the built environment what the benefits are, how to be thinking about interventions there's a lot of opportunities to increase canopy cover and really just raise the level of what does the urban forest provide for us and what is the best practices towards furthering that and certainly again lots of linkages to workforce development and then there's also within SFI we have a brand new in the last revision a new standard or new objective in the standard on climate smart forestry and this provides requirements to the certified organizations in our 350 million acre footprint to consider climate change so both assess the risk and make concrete plans for adaptation and mitigation so if you're interested in learning more about some of the tools and best practices there's lots of opportunities to partner across jurisdictions on these types of best practices and then my last slide I just wanted to highlight that there is in all of the things I've shared there's this opportunity very robust within the farm bill to look across different types of opportunities of lands everything from areas that are deforested or degraded to areas that have minimal or no interventions and they have different benefits and they need different interventions and they would interact with different components of the farm bill and this is a new paper and it actually just was published today so if you're interested in learning more about this different phrases that are used about climate smart forestry and what we're suggesting here is that it needs to be broader and make sure that we're encompassing all ends of the forested spectrum including the built environment to our areas that would be appropriate for high carbon storage and that's it, thank you so much thank you would you like this back? and your pen, thank you I like the idea that maybe this morning you hit publish I gotta get to the briefing that was great Lauren had really great slides just to want to make a reminder or share a reminder that all of the presentation materials are available on our website on the briefing page so you can go back and review Lauren's slides as well as everyone else's you can also watch an archive of the livecast and in the next couple weeks there'll be summary notes as well so if you want to come back and revisit the briefing it'll be an easy way to do that Lauren you also mentioned mass timber we have a mass timber fact sheet that's coming out pretty quickly actually and so that'll be something that will make sure that everybody who RSVPs to the briefing today and signs up to get that information also a great way to stay informed is just climate change solutions it's that bi-weekly user our second panelist today is Brendan Shane Brendan is the climate director at the trust for public land and leads efforts to leverage the power of parks and land protection to build more climate resilient communities the trust for public lands climate program works nationwide with communities of all sizes across a wide range of landscapes to address the increasingly dangerous impacts of climate change through natural and nature based practices before that Brendan served as regional director for North America and deadline 2020 program director for the C40 cities climate leadership group as chief of policy and sustainability for the DC government and the environmental director for the Anacostia Waterfront Corporation Brendan really looking forward to your remarks I'll turn the lectern over to you Thanks It's really a pleasure to be here and I'll just add to Lauren's thanks first of all Lauren is just sort of a powerhouse in this field and so great to have her on the panel so a tremendous resource but thanks to ESI I've been a long time fan and also TPL is a member of US Nature for Climate so we really appreciate that partnership to draw attention to the natural nature based solutions often they get short shrift but they shouldn't all the reasons we'll discuss and I'm happy to dig in today on urban forestry actually click this maybe yeah dig in a little bit on urban forestry or actually I think the Forest Service has this right and Lauren already referenced Forest Service calls it the urban and community forestry program so this is not urban this is not Manhattan forestry this is forestry in every community small and large and the benefits we're talking about Lauren was starting to talk about and then I'll talk about they accrue to everybody everyone deserves that sort of nature access the benefits of green space and at TPL just quickly that's what we do so we work across the country from a number of field offices and then on national policy on state policy we say connecting everyone to the outdoors but what that really means is in today's world and in the climate from the climate perspective building more resilient climate resilient communities so just quickly what does this look like to the point this looks different everywhere but it all matters so I'm just sort of clicking through a few of the projects we work on around the country starting in Florida I really want to big messages that trees in communities are one of the most powerful natural climate solutions people like trees people like to be near trees and intuitively understand the benefits and then we pay a price people's health suffers people's mental health suffers when we lose that tree canopy which we are I'll talk about that a little bit at the end Florida Hawaii Montana and other communities community forests I'll talk about a little bit later Vermont more urban settings this is a recently reconstructed playground in a school in New York City which formally was just asphalt I grew up on a playground just asphalt this one was like that a few years ago and so bringing forestry and urban canopy into communities that haven't had it previously Atlanta, Georgia small towns you know all around the country as well as major metro areas so in all of these places the importance it's always been important but it's growing the importance is growing because of the issues we're dealing with with climate so the shade that you get under a tree and I just walk my dog from one tree to another on a sunny day right I just pick the side the shade here and I pick you know that's people understand this but it's just growing increasingly more important so when you look across the country we understand that extreme heat is growing I put up stats for Burlington Vermont because you know it's not all it's not just growing in the south right matter of fact it's warming more rapidly in the north so when you look at Burlington or let's say you go across the Minnesota, Washington the northern latitudes places that never had so average historic days above 100 heat index will shift to 8 in the next couple of decades and you'll be looking at close to a month of 100 degree heat index in Burlington Vermont later this century so now is the time to plant the tree that will be 20, 30, 40, 50 years old when you get to 2070, 2080 right so it's also imperative sometimes it's hard to think that far in advance but we need to plan now same way on the flooding side we tend to look at at heat and managing storm water and flood intensity as you know two big primary issues benefits of urban forestry but the same way we have heat rising we have changes in precipitation and you have really intense storms trees can do a really remarkable job as green infrastructure to help cities manage more intense storms so there's a great report out just this year from Climate Central who is a resource I would always point people toward they're just wonderful at bringing the science together and making it applicable so this is Jacksonville for Duval County I just happened to grab but this report there's a whole online set of resources for 200, 300 communities and counties you can go in and you can see the report what are the benefits as they roll up of that storm water management so that is you know it sounds like a great thing but when you think about it well that's less flooding in a home it's less flooding in a street it's less storm water less pollution into streams it's less erosion in the stream you know the benefits are significant the congressman mentioned you know air pollution benefits right so that's true out in the rural lands it's true in the urban lands so you know significant benefits of pollutant removed and then he also mentioned carbon capture so I'll just click through these quickly that you know they have a map you can go in and find you can look at counties across the country for storm water runoff for air pollution for carbon removal I will mention though since I'm talking focusing a little bit here on urban community urban and community so I grew up in western Iowa which looks like well there's no real benefit here you know in western Iowa well there is actually because in Sioux City where I grew up you know it's the forested part is the community and you go down the road to Lamar's or some other small town and you'll see you can tell when you're getting to the town because you see the trees right so as you roll it up to counties and as you look state by state the numbers are not as large but that benefit to air quality to storm water capture is significant in communities everywhere in the country and it rolls up from a climate perspective so when the EPA rolls up the numbers for the climate inventory you see 15% of all the carbon that's sequestered by forests in the United States are these trees that are in a community right so this is a big chunk 1 out of 7 a 7th of the problem and it's an opportunity to grow that to have that sort of broader natural climate solution benefit from a global perspective just to dig in a little bit you can go on and on and there are resources about the benefits of trees so I'll just hit a couple of highlights here but resources I forgot to put the website on here but healthytreeshealthylives.org is one one summary I mean and they just sort of go through the benefits the research is significant and growing all the time the science is backing up what many of us sort of might have known to begin with that it strengthens your body right that it nourishes the mind and nourishes financial health so you can go through all of these all the studies clearly some of the big benefits increased canopy is going to reduce and cool a community as the heat increases and that's just directly related to health so the cooler you are the more you have the ability to get cool on a hot day the healthier you will be particularly for the old for the young people the mental health connection is huge so one really fascinating study basically says the more tree canopy you have in poorer communities the fewer mental health problems you see on average right so it is there's a whole suite of data and science connecting the benefits of being in and around trees to people's mental health two great resources to look at here so the question is for your districts or wherever well how does my canopy compare where do I have canopy where I don't so American Forest a great partner they have treeequitiescore.org for most of the country ParkServe is a TPL resource showing the green spaces parks in every community across the country and for instance ParkServe currently has heat mapping for every community across the country as well as other sort of climate and health related risks one last piece TPL focused on creating parks national parks neighborhood parks trails community school yards of all kinds this study is actually just being released today at the International Play Association in Scotland some of the new brand new data on the relationship between trees and parks so that's super exciting for us but when you look at parks the number one determinant of usage is it near people right so it's a location if it's close to people it's used more the second biggest determinant in this study is the presence of mature trees so the parks that will ramp up uses the highest are the ones with trees and so those are that's where you get the community connection benefit you get to play education benefit and other benefits as well when your park has mature trees so just some other some kind of wrap up numbers there's a lot of this is not a small piece I mentioned 15% of the carbon capture this rolls up to 127 million acres 5 plus billion trees the US Forest Service and FIA and their I Tree Suite they wonderful resources for sort of putting so that rolls up to 18 billion dollars in benefits but Forest Service has also documented that we're losing it right so in the community space we're losing on average 175,000 acres 36 million trees a year public space this is overall right so it's public space it's private space all of which need to sort of redouble efforts to reverse that trend and in particular just to highlight that we're losing trees but many of our communities haven't had trees for generations right so we have particularly look at some of these fascinating studies of the correlation of redlining to tree canopy today and it's basically the same map and when you look at class D redline versus class A I mean this is half as much canopy and in many places it's well less than half so the emphasis you know we need to build more canopy everywhere for the benefits but for instance in the U.S. Forest Service new urban and community forestry program that's rolling out now very concerted effort to direct that funding to underserved communities so just a few policy recommendations I mean the first one is the big one right IRA 1.5 billion for urban and community forestry unprecedented funding into that program that is just you know it has a huge potential for impacting communities all across the country so continuing that and then specifics of you know waving match requirements and promoting it in a way that's more accessible is really critical I wanted to mention super briefly at the beginning the community forest program most people may not even have heard of it but TPL has been working with communities rural communities all across the country under the forest service community forest program and I we just like to highlight it it's an amazing program it basically facilitates a community to buy the forest that they live in or live adjacent to it may be their water supply it may be a recreational land it may be working lands that's near them and so you end up with communities small towns that actually pay part of their budget they'll run their operations off of conservation the water protection the timbering and such from land that they own amazing program that we're hoping will grow in the farm and then I also just mentioning a priority from our team so we don't just do urban work we do millions of acres of conservation all across the country and so just to maybe you know come full circle it really is all related and to the points that others on the panel will make proposals like the forest conservation easement program that are more focused on larger tracks of private lands you know they're going to advance climate smart forestry they're going to be building jobs and providing the climate benefits that we need so I will stop there at some point I'm going to start being skeptical that these reports are actually being published today I believe Lauren she went first I'm going to give you the benefit of doubt but Freddie and Christine if you try to claim that something's being published today I think we'll meet that with skepticism Brenda you mentioned extreme heat just about a year ago we did a briefing on extreme heat it was part of our our living with climate change briefing series from last I think it was like April through June so you want to learn a little bit more about that we had some really excellent experts joining us on that panel and that's available on our website you can search for that we've covered a lot of ground we will cover a lot of ground I'm sure there's lots of questions so for folks in the room when we get to the Q&A we will have a microphone and an opportunity to have a conversation with our panelists if you're in our online audience you can send us an email with your question that's askask at ESI.org you can follow us on social media at EESI online our third panelist today is Freddie Davis Freddie is the director of the rural training and research center at the federation of southern cooperatives this collective membership or the collective membership of the federation owns the rural training research center located in Sumter County Alabama he counsels clients on how to best generate revenue from their land or property Freddie welcome to the briefing it means a lot that you traveled here to be with us today thank you so this was published yesterday it'll be available after the briefing so we've Lauren and Brennan talked about the importance of trees and I think we all understand the importance of trees and understand what trees do but I won't come and talk with you guys from a different perspective why should I have trees why should I as a forest landowner have trees those trees are benefiting society as a whole and doing the things that trees do but why should I as a forest landowner own trees what are the benefits to me as a forest landowner and so I think those are some of the things that we've got to understand is that these these resources that's being managed by non-industrial private landowners those are individuals so what's the benefits to them and I think the farm bill has got the opportunity to address a lot of promoting those forests being I think we've heard the term already working forests and that working forest means that that forest is not only it's working for all of us but most importantly that forest is working for that forest landowner so that that forest landowner can maintain that forest and that's a concept I think we all need to walk away with today is how do we guarantee that those forests are not converted into other things that might generate a little more revenue to that landowner because that landowners intended to maintain that landownership so there's a couple of ways that that can be addressed in the farm bill most of agriculture and forestry operations in the US are subsidized by the Department of Agriculture in some way or fashion and there are programs that are geared around incentivizing landowners for maintaining that forest land as programs geared around the marketing and developing markets for the wood products that's coming from that forest land and so I think those are programs that really need to be highlighted in the farm bill in 2023 because we understand the importance of trees and I come at it from a little bit different perspective because with the Federation our the landowners that we work with are historically underserved landowners across the southeast US and those landowners right now those landowners, the average landowner holding is 40 acres in the realm of forestry that's rather small there are a lot of forest landowners out there that have small holdings historically underserved and otherwise but those forests are the highest risk forest that we have those forests are the forest that's being threatened by development those are the forest that's being threatened by afforestation those are the forest that's being harvested and not replanted so those I think the opportunity in the farm bill is to address how do we keep those forests as working forest and promoting programs that will that will really target those lands there are a couple of flagship programs that when we start talking on the ground management through USDA and that's some of the NRCS programs equip conservation stewardship program equip environmental quality incentives program they're funding that's there to assist landowners with the management practices that will promote healthy good forest and right now one of the things that we're as an organization the Federation is pushing for a larger set of sites for historically underserved landowners so that there's more funding there for those underserved landowners to really participate in forestry to assist them with maintaining working forest and so what that does is as we go to landowners and talk to them about the importance of trees and let them know about what trees we do provide technical assistance and technical assistance is one of the other things that's funded through the farm bill so as we take those resources allocated to technical assistance to tell landowners about all the opportunities then we've got the programs and we've got the funding behind those programs to actually back up so if I come tell you about managing forest and how important that is then we've got the resources there in order to promote the use of the technical assistance that we've been providing so I think we look at increasing the funding on programs that are geared toward incentivizing landowners for having working forest and then technical assistance so I spoke on technical assistance technical assistance is important we are lacking in technical assistance in the area of forestry the industry forest industry as forest industry got smaller in the U.S. access to technical assistance also went in the same direction and a lot of those providers of technical assistance they that resource just kind of disappeared that knowledge disappeared with the industry getting smaller and more consolidated so I think the funding around technical assistance is something that we've really got to look at and address in a pointed way we start talking about carbon programs and having the conversation around carbon programs and what carbon look like and that's another way to incentivize these forest landowners for maintaining their forest and keeping forest forest but let's look at it at scales and a lot of this we've got to look at at scales that can really affect some of these smaller landowners family forest landowners those are the landowners that's important those are again those are the higher risk forest so we've got to look at how those be intentional about how those carbon programs are working and look at the ones that we're actually subsidizing and do they fit all forest landowners all forest landowners have opportunity to really participate in those programs in a way that it will incentivize them justly for maintaining their forest land and we look at capacity and look at capacity around managing so if we've got the funding to do this we've got to we've provided technical assistance we've got the funding and now we've got to implement these practices we've got to implement the prescribed burns we've got to implement the understory treatments we've got to go in and have the professionals to make these recommendations so there's opportunity around capacity building and I think that's something that we've got to look at intentionally is how do we build a capacity to to implement the things that we know needs to be implemented in order to release and maintain forest land so those are all opportunities that's within the farm build through and we've got to look at it creatively and say well how can we do this you know is it working through building capacity on some of the national forest through some of the contractors that's also working in relation to doing some of the things that's taking place on national forest do we use that do we use our national forest as a conduit to train professionals that are then available to work with non-industrial private landowners so I think we've got to kind of step outside of the box and see exactly what that should look like in order to promote the capacity so we've went through all of this we've got the capacity, we've got the funding now we've got our forest now comes the important part how is this forest going to support me owning it so then we look at the markets and the opportunity around the markets and look at the opportunity around solid wood products and what that looks like and a lot of the forest land that I'm working with because of the past and as an organization what we're seeing is that we have a lot of mismanaged forest out there we have a lot of mismanaged forest out there so we've got a lot of low value forest products we've got a lot of low value forest products out there we saw the slide on bio energy bio fuels some of those markets are some of the markets that will allow us to go in and take an unhealthy forest and create a healthy forest by removing some of that low value material and then taking that low value material and using it for energy and things of that example so those creating those markets then starts incentivizing those landowners for having working for us so I guess I said all that to say is we've got to look at this thing as a system from one end to the other end and if we interject resources at one end and not the other end our whole forest ecosystem is going to be off the way that things work is going to be off so let's take this opportunity with the farm bill to address it address this forestry issue systematically from management to marketing thank you thank you Freddie that was great I love systems thinking it's really the right way to think about a lot of things and also landowners are part of that system and thinking about them and from their perspective makes a ton of sense really appreciate that our fourth panelist today is Christine Katigan Christine is the executive vice president for carbon origination at the American Forest Foundation as a family land over herself Christine has long recognized the unique opportunity for family owned forests in the US to contribute to meaningful conservation outcomes while still realizing individual objectives for the landowners themselves Christine has led the family forest carbon program at AFF since its inception setting the strategy from ideation to design to implementation spend at the American Forest Foundation for almost 12 years and lives and works on her tree farm Christine take it away really looking forward to your presentation a little bit shorter than everybody else thank you everybody and thank you to the panelists this has actually been really fun to hear and learn from you all and to see many of you off of a zoom screen for once I just want to start quickly by talking about who the American Forest Foundation is for a forest conservation organization that works with and through small family landowners so many of the folks that Freddie was just talking about and our new strategic direction recognizes that we feel like the greatest opportunity to really make an impact a large scale impact on forest conservation is by considering forest as a natural climate solution to climate mitigation so many of the themes that have sort of threaded a couple of these presentations Lauren already talked about this slide I'll do it quickly, thank you Lauren for doing this for me but I just want to recognize again that really this next decade is the most critical decade for us to actually stay aligned on a two degree pathway and given the current available technology there really is not an option for us to stay on this two degree pathway if we don't consider natural climate solutions and in the U.S. what does that look like Lauren shared that really great slide and the U.S. more than half of the natural climate solution potential is with forests and interestingly if you go back and look at Lauren's slide again the coloring, the green coloring indicates which of those natural climate solution opportunities are cost effective and forests not only have a tremendous volume to provide but they're also some of the most cost effective solutions so it really makes sense to think about how we can put these forests to work for a climate mitigation solution unfortunately when you look at the voluntary carbon marketplace right now which is where we're actually transacting these nature based solutions in the form of voluntary credits very few transactions are actually representative of what forests could potentially provide so you see in this graph the orange is what's currently transacted in reforestation, improved forest management or avoided conversion but the green is the opportunity so there's a lot of opportunity for us to put more forests to work and infuse more private climate finance in this work Family Forest so this is the lens with which we do this work Family Forest are the largest ownership share of forests in the U.S. We also know that our rural forest currently sequester about 15% it ranges but about 15% of total U.S. emissions and if we do some of the climate smart forestry tactics that Lauren was also talking about and even what some of the other panelists were talking about then we could double that impact so again lots of opportunity to invest in forest to do more but another kind of missed opportunity that we're hoping to fix right now less than 1% of forest carbon projects are on lands are on individual lands that are less than 5,000 acres so Freddie talked about how the population of landowners that he works with the average owner size is about 40 acres when you think about small non-industria private forest landowners across the U.S. it's about 70 acres so lots of individuals this is 39% of U.S. forest who own very small individual parcels and aggregate are millions of individuals across the landscape who really can't take advantage of these forest carbon projects as they exist today why? quite intuitively they can't capitalize on economies of scale there's high barriers to entry the costs associated with application inventory long-term monitoring reporting verification just a small landowner can't really navigate the complexities of those programs there's also lack of technical assistance so Freddie talked about technical assistance landowners don't really know how to manage their forest they don't have a professional to talk to to help them navigate these decisions they just need support and help to think about what's right for them and then the last but not least and we talk about forest carbon markets or we talk about carbon markets in general there's a lot of market volatility there and these are some risks that landowners themselves families themselves are not yet ready not yet ready to assume responsibility for so that comes back to the opportunities within the farm bill what could potentially be the government's role and one of the major ways that we think that there's opportunity here is that these one time grants these investments can really be that this kind of catalytic force that leverages projects that are interested in leveraging opportunities through forest carbon markets other ways to infuse private climate finance into this work so thinking about these one term investments as opportunities for this long term large scale impact so I wanted to take you through a quick exercise this slide right here represents the current investment in small forest landowner and forest conservation so what you'll see represented in the black here is the business as usual farm bill conservation spending so there's a lot of great programs, equip CSP, Freddie talked about how instrumental those programs are in supporting forest landowners the IRA and the bipartisan infrastructure law huge unprecedented investment that's that huge bump that you see all of a sudden we have you know millions and millions more dollars will be invested in forest conservation so that's current investment in small forest landowners so imagine with me that you take 1% of that total just 1% and divert it to projects that specifically leverage private climate finance through the voluntary carbon market imagine that reality all of a sudden what you see is exponential impact in forest conservation so we're using, we're unlocking the potential of this private climate finance and we're putting it to work in forests and you see through the end of the decade it's like a 12 billion dollar difference and that's a pretty massive impact on forest conservation and importantly on climate mitigation and natural climate solutions so what can we specifically do in the farm bill first and foremost like I mentioned before my fellow panelists have mentioned the IRA and the bipartisan infrastructure law historic level of investments in small and underserved landowners in particular programs like the U.S. Forest Service Landscape Scale Restoration Program the NRCS Conservation Programs like EQUIP, CSP first and foremost it's important to protect these investments and do so in a way that really respects the innovative equitable spirit with which they were authorized so that's priority number one for the farm bill and I should say too Lauren thank you for mentioning the forest in the farm bill and the forest climate working group many of these recommendations that all of us really have proposed you'll see represented in those coalitions platforms as well so it's another good resource in thinking about some administrative flexibilities which we might explore in the next farm bill so I think Freddie maybe I can't remember if you touched on this but I know we've talked about this in the past thinking about how we can administer some of those farm bill conservation programs more equitably and thinking about match exemptions or cost share or cost share exemptions for some underserved landowners in particular and match flexibility that's what I meant to say another thing to consider is we learned in the 2014 farm bill when RCPP was created it was this great innovative awesome program that we're all excited for and a couple years later a couple grant cycles later I think we've learned a little bit more about what it takes to actually implement these programs so I think there's opportunity to streamline RCPP delivery even more invest in the partner capacity these are the partners that are actually implementing these programs and also increase access of partners so that they can work directly with landowners more comprehensively and really build that trusting relationship and the last piece that I'll talk about before we dive into panel discussion is the Roll Force Markets Act this is a marker bill that AFF has been working on and what it does actually is hopefully unlock private climate finance a little bit more holistically a little bit more excessively to some of these project developers so essentially it's a loan or a bond guarantee that partners, project developers can use to access mainstream capital mainstream investments and we can if you consider some of the provisions included in the Roll Force Markets Act I think we can consider some of those investments in the form bill itself so one other thing to think about and I think that's it so I'll turn it back over to you guys a great presentation that brings us, like Christine was just saying that brings us to our Q&A and so we have someone has a microphone and so if anyone has questions in the audience, catch my eye and raise your hand and we'll do our best to get to them and perhaps to get us started I have two things so we don't usually do this but someone on our YouTube channel asked us for a link, Lauren, to the paper that was allegedly published today would you mind sharing audibly through the microphone the link and then also writing it down so Dan O can put it in the YouTube chat or YouTube comments it's in plus climate it's P-L-O-S climate so just like the name of the paper you think? Google Plus Climate and my last name Cooper Climate Smart Forestry McFarland is my co-author on it I should do it so I was going to share the link before but I didn't have it yet so it's supposed to have come out at 2pm eastern today I'm not making it up this is getting a little too I know so it's P-L-O-S I think you should be able to find it is it something we could add to the briefing page? yes it'll be open source so for the people on the YouTube channel who had that question we'll also post it with the presentation materials on the YouTube page thanks for your interest okay so to get us started with questions I would like to start with one about the differences between public and private ownership of forests my question is how does forest management differ across public versus private lands and what are the most important things to understand about those distinctions in the context of a Farm Bill and Lauren maybe we'll start with you and then we'll go down through the line hearing from Brendan and Freddie and Christine so yeah thanks for the question it is very important and it's really interesting that the Farm Bill though does have an opportunity to reach across different landowner types and different jurisdictions between the forest and private I think generally it's important to distinguish that private has a scale of landowners and they have different goals and different capacities to manage their land or have interventions so Freddie gave us very helpful insights into the smaller and Christine also backed that up some of the challenges for smaller landowners so that's whether accessing technical assistance or even just having market information and understanding what the options may be and then having the capacity to actually implement that so there's a lot of really fundamental barriers to undertaking these actions larger landowners though also sometimes need incentives to whether it's large industrial actors incentives access to best practices when we look at the forest and some of the challenges facing forest they don't end at any jurisdiction and landowner type and so there's a lot of opportunity I think to think really holistically at a landscape level and for public lands it's not always a fair assumption that they have all the resources that they need and there's provisions in the Farm Bill actually good neighbor authority that allows for actors to support across public land the implementation of key practices and work together to deal with threats to forest or to assist with management and so there's a lot of collaboration really I think across all of it and there's even potential for more of that but even that like public private distinction is one big distinction but then even within there there's quite a lot of variation and so just to say I think that especially with the changing climate again there's a need really on all fronts to make sure that there's resources and capacity to deal with the challenges and that's both in just the technical assistance and on the ground implementation but also to make sure that there is the markets and the economic rationale to make sense because it's wonderful that we have these large investments but as Christina alluded to there's opportunities to really have them as catalysts that are creating permanent changes in our economy and how we value forests and diversify the options which actually are important for both public and private landowners like private landowners are engaging in carbon markets but there's a project in Michigan on public lands that's also doing that so some of even those are not divided by the landowner type but certainly the support and having adequate resources are important across the board Brendan what are some differences from your perspective about public and private land land management? Well I was going to maybe echo Lauren that a lot of it is the same but I mean the lines you often will walk from public to private to public and private in a short distance and so just emphasizing that the ability to really focus on that the information it's a rapidly changing environment how we can and should manage forests needs to be looked at closely and we need to be innovative in how we're doing this the ability of the farm bill to engage both government agencies and the private sector to be pushing out information technical assistance the best science on how to manage really is critical I think and just getting more critical like every minute so when you suddenly have fire regimes that are different than they were when people grew up it's changing rapidly so so I would just emphasize the importance of the federal role in advancing the best practices as our climate is changing Freddie in places where the federation serves communities that you all work with what are some differences in terms of how forests are managed between the public and the private sector I think okay I'll do just the opposite of what you just asked so I'll tell you about the likeness right off is in the areas that we work in there's a heavy ass property issue where you've got tenants incoming that might not have the same management objective I see that as being public lands I see the commonality there and that that really affects the management decisions that's being made on public and the private lands that we're working with I think policies to address both of them or something that's going to be critical in the future of having sustainable public lands lands that's actually going to be beneficial to the public might actually take some management that we need to educate the public on what we're doing and same policies we need through the farm building addressing areas property with the landowners that we're working with. Christine would you like the last word on this? Sure yeah the only thing I would add that hasn't been said is particularly with private landowners with non-industrial private landowners there's complex ownership structures there's a million different ownership structures areas property issues is one of the issues that comes along with some of those varied ownership and that just makes for really complex decision making processes so that's first and foremost it's hard to get all of the owners on board to make a decision it's hard to make these decisions legally and then the second thing that I would mention that's different for small landowners is the operability factor so with large landowners with public landowners obviously again you can capitalize on those economies of scale you can get operators out there to do the work that you need to do on the ground but with large landowners it's just a lot harder to do that it's harder to access them it's harder to find them it's harder to count on them to be able to sort of service your needs so just a lot more different and varied challenges with this large disparate disaggregated group of landowners Thanks So this has come up a couple times today here in Washington it's very hazy and the cause of that haze are wildfires in Canada and so I'm curious how your work with wildfire mitigation whether that's prefire mitigation fighting active fires and post fire recovery and Brendan maybe we should start with you and we can go down through the line and end with Lauren It's a huge issue and lots of well particularly in the west but now increasingly everyone I think needs to pay attention to that well it's just a huge challenge it's a big issue and it's a big challenge to figure out how best to manage some of the federal investments that have been made and the ability to invest further in as you were mentioning reducing fuels and forest management with climate risks in mind is critically important and states like California the Forest Service others others in the research and academic are sort of working to figure out how to do that we're sort of on implementing side at Trust Republic Land so these questions become real when you're trying to preserve you know maybe huge maybe 100,000 acres that you want to have accessible for the public you want it to be providing biodiversity wildlife water quality benefits for the long term understanding how best to manage that for the fire risk is critical and so we're consumers of that information but then also on the the wooey right the wild land urban interface and communities that aren't even in the wild lands but are in fire prone areas these issues are going to become more and more critical Freddie could you explain a little bit more about how your work intersects with the wildfire challenges that we're facing the use of prescribed burn and the comfort with using fire in forest I think is providing for us is providing that education and that hands-on exposure to landowners with fire that's doing fire demonstrations things like that where we've got groups that come out or we go out on their forest and implement fires to get people comfortable with using fire because fire is one of our best tools at preventing wildfires and and so it's I think that's that's where the intersection is but also there's an opportunity I think with we talked about the resources that's being used to fight fire well we're what community are those resources being used in how diverse is our fire fighting effort you know I think when we talk about a system we gotta look at the whole system because those resources come back to the communities when fire season is over and what do they do they implement fire within their community or they fight fire within their communities you know so I think it's opportunities there to build capacity in these areas when we start talking about the funding and funding pools and where we're spending resources we'll talk about integrating and or going into underserved communities and talking about forestry but let's talk about building this system that's gonna be there when we leave that's gonna that's gonna be sustainable or regenerative that that's the new word regenerative it's gonna be regenerative it's gonna restore so that's it that's great Christine um Brendan and I were chatting about this a little bit before the panel started and just acknowledging that the cause of the haze today is from the fires in Nova Scotia right and these are fires in an ecosystem that they are just not sort of unprecedented in recorded history they don't have the infrastructure to support that and so thinking about how we can start to prepare these places that have less familiarity less kind of understanding of these potential catastrophic impacts I think it comes down to increase technical assistance for landowners encouraging active forest management so we talked a lot about these climate smart forestry practices yes of course they help enhance the carbon storage and sequestration but they also help enhance the climate resiliency of these forests so that they can better respond to these catastrophic events which of course many of the Farmville Conservation programs promote right it's all about incorporating many of these activities these management activities on the ground and then the last piece particularly from a landowners perspective is long-term planning so actually just thinking about what does it mean to manage your forest what are some of the things that I should be considering you know many folks just kind of it's the woods out back right they haven't really given it an extra thought so I think some of these are all investments and programs and things that the Farmville can do to help us prepare for more of these catastrophic events Lauren I think this gives you the last word at our briefing today we're just about at time okay well I would just add one one extra piece to the fire topic because it is so scary really and it's very daunting but to try to look at it from even a positive lens is to bring it back to like jobs and additional what needs to happen at what scale and who's gonna do the work and how do we make sure that they're compensated or they have the expertise and we need a diverse workforce we need to attract very diverse people to this field for a really wide range of activities everything from the forestry side but what to do with materials if you're taking materials out we need a lot of innovation and so the Farmville obviously really can directly support a wide range of activities to make sure that the forests are healthy and that we have we're being proactive as much as we can but we're also thinking of building a system that is different and functions different and attracts people to this work for the long term so we'll leave it at that great thank you so much thank you to our tremendous panel today thank you Lauren, Brendan, Freddie and Christine for your excellent presentations and for joining us today it was a really great conversation and I learned a ton and I'm gonna go back and look at Lauren's slides and everyone else's slides as well and everyone else can do that as well if you wanna go back and revisit any of the presentation on our archive webcast it's very big thanks to Representative Carter and his awesome staff for helping us get the room today which is always a big lift and also for joining us via pre-recorded video remarks I'd like to say once again big thanks to Nathan and Francis at US Nature for Climate always a huge pleasure to work with them and thanks to Doug and Ali at NCBA as well for helping us network across the cooperative landscape if you will and for being a really great panelist for the cultural development panel seriously if you didn't check it out you gotta check it out I'd also like to say big thanks to my colleagues Dan O'Brien, Omri, Allison, Anna and Molly and we are joined today Nicole just joined our policy team this week this is her first briefing so she'll always remember what it was like the bloom is still on the rose and so welcome Nicole we're really happy to have you here on our policy team our interns which I think might be a record we should make it like the cabinet where one of them has to stay back at the office just in case but big thanks to Georgia, Isabella, Parthov and Sydney for being with us today I mentioned our mass timber mass timber fact sheet we've got that's coming up I don't know if there's a slide on that I was thinking there might be but my clicker is not clicking anyway do we have the survey slide is it clear? I think I saw it earlier let me put that up yeah this is wild this is like the tenet version of our briefing nope okay wait, Dan O will put the survey slide while he's doing that we've got the mass timber fact sheet coming out subscribe to climate change solutions so you don't miss that it will be really really good we also have some upcoming briefings the two I think that we'll be back up here for conservation really really great briefing and we will also have our we'll also have our Renewable Energy and Energy Efficiency Expo and Policy Forum on Tuesday July 18th this is an all day event we're even going to have a reception which is going to be really fun we're working with our friends Senator Reid and Senator Crapo who chair the Senate Renewable Energy and Energy Efficiency Caucus so that's going to be a really really great event we also have an exhibition space and like I said we're going to have a party at the end of the day as well so check out our website so that you can RSVP with that and the thing that Dan O is putting up is this is just a link to our survey if you have a few moments and you'd like to share your feedback about today's briefing it's really really helpful we read every response and that's the link if you had any AV problems if you had any technical problems if you have ideas our battery is running low so we're going to end right now before the computer turns off so I hope everyone has a great rest of your Wednesday and thank you again panelists for joining us for this really great briefing, thanks