United States Endowment Forestry

The Endowment advances its mission using a "theory of change" that focuses on three areas: retaining and restoring healthy working forests; promoting and capturing multiple value streams using market-based tools; and enhancing community capacity, collaboration, and leadership. The Endowment deploys its work through five primary initiatives, each of which supports several programs or projects. I. Ecosystem Markets: Monetizing non-traditional forest products. The Endowment continues a focus on water as an ecosystem market. The Endowment is partially funding coordinators across the country who work with local partners to seek State Revolving Fund loans for forested watershed protection and management, which will help keep drinking water supplies clean and affordable. The Endowment is also exploring opportunities for biodiversity credits for landowners as another source of revenue that will contribute to conservation goals. II. Forest Retention and Health: Retaining/expanding and ensuring health of forests. This is a wide-ranging initiative that includes serving as cross-border convener for more strategic collaboration between Canada and the U.S. Other work includes corporate partnerships to protect bottomland hardwood forests, the Department of Defense's base buffering program and innovative financing approaches for forest management and retention. Each is designed to aid in retention and restoration of healthy working forests. A corporate partnership provides funding for conservation of high-value bottomland hardwood forests in North Carolina and Virginia; this program is a model for public-private partnerships. The Endowment works with local conservation partners to take advantage of USDA funds through the Natural Resources Conservation Service. Their Regional Conservation Partnership Program awards finance conservation easements that protect forests that are important for the environment and that sustain local jobs and economies. III. Traditional Markets: After successful work that led to the creation of two commodity check-offs - Softwood Lumber Board and Paper & Paper-based Packaging Board -- more recent work has included supporting initiatives to advance public understanding of the benefits of working forests and the role they play in climate solutions. We are also continuing to develop blockchain solutions through a program called ForesTrust, which seeks to track the supply chain of timber and forest products from forests to end-product, which helps alleviate issues involving illegal logging. IV. Future Markets: The Endowment is partnering with the USDA Forest Service and emerging producers to advance commercialization of cellulosic nanomaterials. This multi-year initiative engages partners to fill knowledge gaps facilitating new products and applications while placing a primary interest on ensuring human and environmental health and safety. Work continues to advance mass timber applications to support tall wooden buildings, including advancing the carbon story of forest products. The Endowment is investigating potential benefits and concerns associated with forest carbon. In response to an increase in public and private investment in carbon management and climate smart forestry on private forest lands, the Endowment is funding programs and workshops to better understand and quantify landowner capacity and willingness to adopt carbon management practices and the implications for other forest land uses (e.g., wood products). Through the US Biochar Initiative project, we work with partners to increase applications, market, and production of biochar with the ultimate goal of carbon being buried in the ground, allowing carbon credits to be realized. The Forest & Wood Carbon Data Platform launch in 2023 created a single U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA)-sponsored platform with multiple user-friendly tools providing transparent, high-integrity forest and wood product carbon data throughout the value chain. The platform will include six measurement, monitoring, reporting, and verification (MMRV) tools that align with a U.S. Forest Service (USFS) objective to serve as the primary source of information on carbon and carbon flows across U.S. Forest lands, harvested wood products, and end-use life cycle assessment. V. Asset Creation: We continue to support the Sustainable Forestry and Land Retention (SFLR) network and their goal to use forests and forest-based assets to create economic opportunity for African American landowners. American Forest Foundation is now the SFLR fiscal agent. SFLR is a multi-year program in partnership with the USDA Forest Service and NRCS across eight southern states and has successfully seen 1,500 black families move their lands into the forest management pipeline. We are applying the applied learnings for our work with the SFLR network to explore Hispanic/Latino landowners and their ability to generate wealth for their families and communities. We continue to work with the Economic Development Administration in New England in partnership with the Northern Forest Center to assist in finding local economic solutions to help offset the impact of the closure of much of the region's pulp and paper production.