LAND USE PLANNING: A TIME-TESTED APPROACH FOR ADDRESSING CLIMATE CHANGE

Oregon’s land use planning program has protected an estimated 1.2 million acres of forest and agricultural land from development since its inception in 1973. As a result, these resource lands continue to provide forest products and food as well as another unexpected benefit: carbon storage. By keeping forests as forests, land use planning capitalizes on the natural landscape’s ability to sequester atmospheric carbon, a key contributor to climate change. Nationwide, however, forest land is the land type most frequently converted to more developed uses. When this happens, carbon storage opportunities are lost, and the new use, such as a housing development, often becomes a net carbon producer. Scientists from the Pacific Northwest Research Station and Oregon Department of Forestry quantified the carbon storage maintained by the land use planning program in western Oregon. They found these gains were equivalent to avoiding 1.7 million metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions annually—the amount of carbon that would have been emitted by 395,000 cars in a year. Had the 1.7 million metric tons of stored carbon been released through development, Oregon’s annual increase in CO2 emissions between 1990 and 2000 would have been three times what it actually was. As policymakers look for ways to mitigate climate change, land use planning is a proven tool with measurable results.