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About The daily Astorian. (Astoria, Or.) 1961-current | View Entire Issue (Jan. 16, 2021)
A3 THE ASTORIAN • SATURDAY, JANUARY 16, 2021 Warm Springs tribes evaluate environmental project after wildfi re son worked for ventures from 2013 to 2016. “They had to reassess the burned areas and how they would regenerate,” Sampson said. By MICHAEL KOHN The Bulletin Five years ago, the Con- federated Tribes of Warm Springs set aside 24,000 acres of forestland for a project to sequester carbon and reduce greenhouse gases. Last sum- mer, more than half of that forest went up in smoke in the devastating Lionshead fi re. Now tribes, which earned millions of dollars from the Cali- fornia Air Resources Board for the project, are hard at work assessing just how much was lost. Bobby Brunoe, general manager for the tribe’s b ranch of n atural r esources, so far calculates that 15,000 acres of the project area were lost in the fi re. Overall, the Lion- shead fi re burned 204,000 acres, of which 96,000 acres are on the Warm Springs Indian Reservation. Warm Springs, located 70 miles north of Bend, sells carbon credits earned through California’s Cap-and-Trade Program, by protecting its forests so they can continue to capture carbon. The pro- gram is a market-based form of regulation that sets an upper limit, or cap, on carbon emissions produced by com- panies in California. The carbon offset projects can be located outside of Cal- ifornia, a policy that opened the door to participation by Warm Springs. Around the country, there are 136 forest offset projects. According to the agree- ment, Warm Springs will maintain and build car- bon stands within its project area for 100 years. At Warm Springs, the area considered for protection was zoned as conditional use, a designation that allowed the tribes to log it if they so desired, although it had not been logged before. Carbon credits Central Oregon Interagency Dispatch Center The Lionshead fi re burns on the Warm Springs Indian Reservation in September. Entering the Cap-and- Trade Program was a fi nan- cial incentive to keep the forest intact and increase its carbon intake capac- ity. But wildfi res like Lions- head throw a wrench in those intentions as the burned trees reverse carbon sequestra- tion, sending carbon into the atmosphere. The California program is protected from wildfi re events through its buffer pool of carbon credits, which are available to use in case forest carbon is lost through wild- fi re or other natural disas- ters. Each forest project con- tributes 10% to 20% of its total credits into the buffer account, which acts as a sort of insurance. The project area on Warm Springs that burned, known as ARC260, is located on the east side of Mount Jefferson. The area will be evaluated for damage, Brunoe said, as not all areas of a forest burn the same — parts of a forest may have a light or heavy burn, or no burn at all. In addition, a burned area is not necessar- ily out of the carbon project as a standing snag can still be counted as carbon. The verifi ed estimate of carbon stocks must be com- pleted by a third party within 23 months, according to the California Air Resources Board. Much of the area where ARC260 is located is inac- cessible due to deep snow, Brunoe said, so research is expected to start in earnest this spring. “The extent and sever- ity of the fi re impact to the Warm Springs carbon project remains unknown and will be under evaluation for the next year and a half, involv- ing detailed forest inventories and modeling,” Brunoe said. Scientists worried Some scientists have expressed concern that the buffer pool is not suffi ciently protected against fi re risks over the 100-year period and hold up Warm Springs as an example. “The fact that the Warm Springs project has burned twice in a decade is a perfect example of the problem,” said Danny Cullenward, a lecturer at Stanford Law School and policy director of Carbon- Plan, a nonprofi t that inde- pendently analyzes carbon removal opportunities based on science and data. “There is no way the protocol’s buffer pool holds up if that pattern is common in the program.” The wildfi re in 2020 wasn’t the fi rst time the proj- ect area burned. When the project was in the set up stage, a wildfi re burned around 2,000 acres of forest within the project boundaries, said Don Sampson, who helped arrange the agreement when he was chief executive of Warm Springs Ventures, the tribe’s economic arm. Samp- When the preparation work was complete, the Cal- ifornia Air Resources Board issued Warm Springs 2.1 mil- lion carbon offset credits. The offsets represented 2.1 million metric tons of veri- fi ed greenhouse gas emission reductions. Annual growth within the project boundary can be con- verted to additional carbon offsets that the tribes can sell. To date, more than 2.6 mil- lion Air Resources Board car- bon offset credits have been issued to Warm Springs. “There are about 20 proj- ects in the range of 1 mil- lion to 5 million offset cred- its upfront, and a handful that get as big as almost 15 mil- lion,” Cullenward said. “I would say Warm Springs is one of the large projects but not atypically large nor on the extreme end of the size distribution.” How are the offset credits used? In 2018, the tribes announced they had con- tracted with a third party to sell the credits over several years and that those credits would provide millions of dollars in revenue for tribal operations, improved forest management and economic development initiatives. The tribes declined to confi rm the specifi c amount received from the agreement. Sampson said the tribes set aside some of the funds for forest thinning and for- est health projects, to prevent wildfi re and tree disease. He said it brought them much-needed revenue. “That was the biggest revenue source they had for quite a few years,” he said. Restrictions: Extreme risk assessment effective Friday Continued from Page A1 “We believe this modifi - cation will provide mental, emotional and economic benefi ts to our community, without introducing sig- nifi cant risk for increased local transmission. We trust businesses and organiza- tions will faithfully manage within the limited allow- ances for indoor activity.” Astoria Mayor Bruce Jones sent a similar letter to the governor on Dec. 31, saying that for restaurants and bars, “the ‘yo-yo’ effect of opening and closing every two weeks is overly burdensome logistically.” Warrenton Mayor Henry Balensifer and Sea- side Mayor Jay Barber also endorsed the request. David Reid, the exec- utive director of the Asto- ria-Warrenton Area Cham- ber of Commerce, sent a similar letter last week to the governor and the Ore- gon Health Authority. He said that if the state has evidence to support prohibitions on indoor activity that it be shared with businesses. The state reclassifi ed the county as extreme risk — effective Friday — based on the local virus case count. Columbia Memorial Hospital, Providence Sea- side Hospital and Clatsop County partnered this week to administer their remain- ing vaccines . People under the fed- eral government’s fi rst pri- ority group were invited to vaccination events at the Bob Chisholm Commu- nity Center in Seaside on Wednesday and the Clat- sop County Fairgrounds on Thursday. Kujala said combin- ing resources, vaccines and staff will be the model moving forward. The county, in partner- ship with Columbia Memo- rial and Providence Sea- side , has created a v accine t ask f orce that is meeting daily to manage the vacci- nation rollout. “However, the supply of available vaccines supplied from the state will likely be exhausted this week or next week, and local pro- viders have not yet been informed of additional shipments,” the county said in a statement. “For that reason, the local vaccination effort will remain focused on remain- ing members of high-prior- ity Phase 1a groups before other identifi ed groups — including teachers and indi- viduals 65 years old and older — can be included.” As of Friday, 1,847 vac- cines have been adminis- tered in the county. The vaccination rollout at the federal and state lev- els has been slow and com- plicated by uncertainty and confl icting information. Brown said Friday that Oregon does not expect increased shipments of vaccines next week. “Last night, I received disturbing news, con- fi rmed to me directly by General (Gustave) Perna of Operation Warp Speed: States will not be receiv- ing increased shipments of vaccines from the national stockpile next week, because there is no federal reserve of doses. “I am demanding answers from the Trump a dministration,” the gover- nor said in a statement. “I am shocked and appalled that they have set an expec- tation on which they could not deliver, with such grave consequences. “This is a deception on a national scale. Oregon’s seniors, teachers and all of us were depending on the promise of Oregon’s share of the federal reserve of vaccines being released to us.” DEL’S O.K. 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