The Yale Forest Forum is the events and outreach hub of The Forest School at the Yale School of the Environment. YFF serves as a forum for engagement, learning, and collaboration on the most pressing topics and challenges related to forests and forest landscapes today. YFF hosts the longest continuously running guest lecture series at the Yale School of the Environment, now offered online and free to the public. Speakers come from a wide range of organizations and perspectives, including government, Indigenous peoples and local communities, NGOs and businesses, working at scales from the local to international. Learnings from the YFF series are published in the YFF Review.
UPCOMING YFF FALL 2022 SPEAKER SERIES:
We are happy to announce our two fall YFF speaker series, offered weekly September- December 2022:
(Re)Considering Planted Forests for the 21st Century
Join us every Tuesday from September 6 - November 15 from 11:30am-12:10pm US ET.
Note: there will be no webinar on October 18.
Connecticut Certified Forest Practitioners may receive 1.0 CEU credits for each live lecture attended. Others may request a certificate of attendance to submit for CEU credits at the certifier of your choosing.
Click here to register. Register once to attend all webinars.
Yale Forest Forum is excited to announce the upcoming Fall 2022 Webinar Series on Reconsidering Planted Forests for the 21st Century, jointly hosted by The Forest School at Yale School of the Environment (YSE) and The Forests Dialogue (TFD). The series will focus on large-scale planted forests for fiber and wood products, in the context of climate change mitigation and adaptation, prospects for innovation, and strategies for meeting environmental and societies varied needs. The speaker series will feature a wide range of experts to discuss the future role of planted forests in addressing urgent needs related to climate, resources, and societal and environmental challenges at regional and global scales. Speakers will represent forestry, academia, forest products industry, investment, conservation, Indigenous and forest-based communities, and climate science.
Planted forests, including tree plantations established for wood production, continue to grow in both extent and significance. Tree plantations currently provide almost half of the world’s commercial wood supply, a proportion expected to increase significantly in coming decades. Yet they represent only a fraction of the worlds tree cover. They also have great potential to deliver environmental services and social benefits. However, many aspects of planted forests have been and remain controversial, with concerns that associated environmental and social costs can outweigh economic and other benefits.
This seminar is the third YFF series focused on the Future Role of Forest Products in a Changing Climate. The first in the series covered issues related to mass timber; the second was on bioenergy. The next seminar in the series will focus on pulp and paper.
For more details about this series, click here.
What Makes a High-Quality Forest Carbon Credit?
Join us every Thursday from September 8 - December 8 from 11:30am-12:10pm US ET.
Note: there will be no webinar on October 20 and November 24.
Connecticut Certified Forest Practitioners may receive 1.0 CEU credits for each live lecture attended. Others may request a certificate of attendance to submit for CEU credits at the certifier of your choosing.
Click here to register. Register once to attend all webinars.
Forests store vast amounts of carbon in vegetation and soils, and humans may be able to protect, manage, and restore forested ecosystems to protect existing carbon and also stimulate faster and greater uptake of atmospheric CO2. Carbon markets are responding to this potential: to date, carbon credits from forests are by far the largest contributor to nature-based offsets. As carbon markets grow, market participants are grappling with fundamental and complex questions of the best methods for measuring, reporting, and verifying CO2 removal from forest carbon projects. Forest carbon accounting is complex because of scientific, political, economic, and social uncertainty. To create transparency and foster credibility in compliance and voluntary forest carbon markets, market players have created voluminous monitoring, verifying, and reporting protocols that cover important metrics in carbon crediting like measurement accuracy and precision, additionality, permanence, leakage, environmental justice, transparency, and traceability. Yet, growing markets have led to growing critiques about carbon accounting methods, market stability, and environmental justice concerns.
This seminar series will explore the current state of carbon markets in the United States and ask major market players—including policymakers, registry developers, credit producers, forestland owners, corporate buyers, journalists, and academics—to address the question of “what makes a high-quality forest carbon credit?” and provide suggestions on how we can build credibility and trust in forest carbon credits.
For more details about this series, click here.
To revisit the spring 2022 YFF speaker series, including recordings of each session and speaker bios, you may do so here:
Theory to Practice of Urban Forest Management
The Future of Forest Products in a Changing Climate: Bioenergy from Forests
YFF ENVIRONMENTAL HUMANITIES AUTHOR DISCUSSION SERIES WITH ORION:
In partnership with Orion Magazine and the Yale Forum for Religion and Ecology, YFF hosted a three-part author discussion series to celebrate the release of Orion’s anthology, “Old Growth.” You can watch the event recordings and learn more information at the following links:
Celebrating Old Growth: A Conversation with Robin Wall Kimmerer, Robert Macfarlane, and David Haskell
To learn more about this event, please click here.
For a recording of the event, please click here.
On Trees: A Conversation with Peter Wohlleben, Jessica J. Lee, and Sumana Roy
To learn more about this event, please click here.
For a recording of the event, please click here.
The Language of Trees: A Conversation with Alison Hawthorne Deming and Kathleen Dean Moore
To learn more about the event, please click here.
For a recording of the event, please click here.
