Arizona Issues
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The agreement developed by local communities, environmental groups, scientists, elected officials, the U.S. Forest Service, and industry in northern Arizona over the last 5 years is unprecedented. It has resulted in consensus social agreement for landscape-scale forest restoration and uncharacteristic fire risk reduction. A paradigm-changing solution, it offers fundamentally “budget neutral” mechanisms for agencies that implement landscape-scale treatments. We now have a window of opportunity to translate this work into a reality.
Accelerating restoration across the Mogollon Rim
Since 2003, the Arizona Governor’s Forest Health Council has made great strides towards building broadly supported, bipartisan agreement that will allow restoration to proceed across our forested landscapes. The Statewide Strategy for Restoring Arizona’s Forests, completed in July 2007, stands as a landmark effort formalizing that agreement.
Forest stakeholders recently furthered that agreement by collaboratively developing the Analysis of Small Diameter Wood Supply in Northern Arizona completed in February 2008. This document provides a science-based social consensus for restoration in northern Arizona; it also estimates the wood and biomass made available to industry by thinning small trees during the restoration process.
To implement this consensus agreement for accelerated, industry-supported restoration, industry partners are needed. Partners must be committed to the ecological goals of restoration, social consensus agreement, and transparent, science-based, multi-party monitoring and adaptive project management. They must also be of an appropriate size and have a proven collaborative track record, broad community support, and the ability to not only dramatically offset per-acre restoration costs but also to support rural development in northern Arizona.
Thus far, Arizona Forest Restoration Products (AZFRP) has stepped forward as an industry demonstrating these commitments. AZFRP will, however, work through a competitive bidding process if (and when) an RFP is released for a large-scale contract.
We are at a critical turning point.
In order to see restoration accelerate across the region, per-acre treatment costs need to become much more efficient by...
- Capitalizing on the social consensus agreement whenever possible to avoid costly controversy
- Working at larger planning and implementation scales
- Using relatively inexpensive space imagery technologies for assessing current conditions, defining restoration strategies, and monitoring restoration effectiveness at the landscape scale
- Allowing ecologically and economically sustainable industry to use restoration byproducts, thus offsetting the overall cost of treatment
Your donations and membership dues make our research, monitoring, and restoration work in Arizona possible.
