IRVING, Texas — Builders FirstSource, the nation’s largest supplier of building products, announced that it has published its 2023 Corporate Social Responsibility report, highlighting advancements in environmental, social, and governance across the Company in 2022. The report offers an overview of the initiatives and programs the Company has implemented to improve transparency and sustainability. Highlights include: Established Scope 1 and 2 greenhouse gas emissions baselines. The Company intends to set short-, medium-, and long-term reduction targets for Scope 1 and Scope 2 emissions no later than 2025; >90% of the Company’s wood is from Sustainable Forestry Initiative (SFI) or Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) certified vendors; and >1.3 million trees saved in 2022 through the use of Builders FirstSource manufactured framing components versus traditional framing methods.
Drax announced it will establish its North American headquarters for Bioenergy with Carbon Capture and Storage (BECCS) in Houston, Texas. The new office will serve as the hub for Drax’s team focused on bringing BECCS projects to fruition throughout the United States and Canada. “With the growing global demand for high-quality carbon removals, Houston was a natural fit for our BECCS headquarters as it is the energy capital of the world with a proven, highly skilled workforce that will be needed to lead the world’s clean energy transition,” said Drax CEO Will Gardiner. “Additionally, the U.S. Gulf Coast has emerged as a major hub for carbon capture and sequestration investment and technology, a key component of the company’s plans to expand clean electric generation from renewable resources.” BECCS is the only technology that can deliver reliable, dispatchable renewable power while permanently removing millions of tons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.
Soil microbiota transplanted from more stressful environmental conditions – drought or excessive heat or cold, for example – can enhance tree tolerance to changing climates, researchers report. The findings suggest that management of soil microbiota, especially during forest restorations, could be a valuable strategy for increasing forest resilience to climate change. Climate change is forcing many species outside of their evolved range of environmental tolerances, forcing them to acclimate, adapt, or migrate to avoid extinction. For long-lived trees, neither adaptation nor migration may happen fast enough to keep up the pace of climate change. However, research shows that diverse assemblages of microbes that live on and around plants, including mycorrhizal fungi in the soil surrounding their roots, can enhance plant tolerance to environmental stress. And since microbial taxa are likely to adapt faster than their host and disperse farther, microbial associations may offer an alternative, underappreciated source of plant community resistance to climate change.
The Seattle City Council voted Tuesday afternoon to pass an updated version of a city ordinance regulating trees on private property, which had not been adjusted since 2009. The legislation will fully overhaul the ordinance for the first time since the section of code protecting trees was adopted in 2001, years before the climate and housing crises came to dominate both city discourse and priorities. Seattleites have since become aware of the many benefits trees provide, from cooling to improving people’s health and general well-being. The city is losing trees faster than it is replanting them, and is thousands of housing units short to meet the demand of a growing population. …But the Urban Forestry Commission and tree advocates worry that the legislation so long in the making was rushed through the voting process. 
CANTON, North Carolina — The closing of the paper mill in Canton is a major loss for its 1,100 employees and a shock to the area’s economy. The ripple effects also make it very bad news for sustainable forestry in the mountains. …While historically some of the supply chain demands necessary to support these industries negatively impacted overall forest health, the paper mill’s use of only low-grade and small-diameter wood created opportunities for sustainable and beneficial forest management. …A sustainable timber harvest usually has to remove lower quality trees to let in enough sun so that a young stand of new trees can grow vigorously and compete in good conditions to develop into a healthy future forest. With no market for low quality trees, these less well adapted trees will now be left even more frequently and will become our future forests.
Enviva harvests trees to manufacture millions of tons of wood pellets annually in the U.S. Southeast to supply the biomass energy demands of nations in the EU, U.K., Japan and South Korea. But a host of operational, legal and public relations problems have led to greater-than-expected revenue losses and a drastic fall in stock price. These concerns raise questions as to whether Enviva can double its projected pellet production from 6 million metric tons annually today to 13 million metric tons by 2027 to meet its contract obligations. Enviva says its problems pose only short-term setbacks. While it isn’t possible to connect Enviva’s stock decline, or the company’s downgrading by a top credit ratings agency, with any specific cause, some analysts say that investors may be getting educated as to the financial risk they could face if the EU or other large-scale biomass users eliminate their subsidies to the industry.
Mosses play a crucial role in fighting climate change, new research shows. Researchers learned that through photosynthesis, mosses sequester around 6.43 billion metric tons more carbon into the soil than what is stored in bare patches of soil without any plants. That calculates to six times the annual global carbon emissions caused by worldwide changes in land use, such as deforestation, urbanization, and mining. The study published in Nature Geoscience and was led by a dryland ecologist in Australia and an ecosystem ecologist in Spain. One of the scientists who co-authored the recent study was forest ecologist Peter Reich, director of the Institute for Global Change Biology at University of Michigan’s School for Environment and Sustainability. …The study found that moss-covered soil not only enhances carbon storage in soil, but also accelerates rates of organic decomposition and leads to fewer cases of soil-borne plant pathogens.
