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Supporting tribal timber markets

Partnering with tribes throughout the region to help market tribal wood products and support data-driven decision-making.

Project partners:

See all six partners

Goals

Climate resilience, Intergenerational wealth-building, Stewardship of lands & waters

California, Oregon, Washington

2024 – 2028

Climate resilience, Forestry, Indigenous leadership, Storytelling, Tools & mapping

Photo credit: Emilie Chen

Page Sections

Overview

Partners

Ecotrust Staff & Services

Resources

Tribes across the Pacific Northwest are leaders in climate smart forestry, offering significant carbon and ecosystem benefits. Ecotrust’s Climate Smart Commodities project aims to increase the procurement of tribal climate smart timber by the architecture, engineering, and construction sector. Ecotrust is working to increase tribal capacity and readiness to engage in marketing of tribal timber as a climate smart commodity by collaborating with tribes to share their unique stories, provide technical assistance, and conduct forest impact assessments to quantify and market the benefits of tribal forest management.

Project Activities

Technical assistance to support tribes in better aligning their management practice with market opportunities including:

Forest impact assessments that characterize embodied carbon and other quantifiable impacts associated with tribal forest management.
Acquisition, review, formatting, clarification and troubleshooting of existing tribal forest inventory and harvest data.
Acquisition, review, formatting, and clarification and troubleshooting of existing remote sensing and other relevant geospatial data products covering tribal forests.
Development of additional forest maps and data layers as needed, which may involve fitting or applying models to impute/estimate forest conditions using remote sensing and tribal forest data.
Generation of maps and tables including annual estimates of forest carbon stocks, stock change, timber output, and other forest attributes of interest to the tribe and/or climate-smart timber purchasers.

Market connections to showcase tribal forest products including:

Facilitating introductions and at local, regional, and national events, particularly within the green building and construction sectors.
Attracting leaders from the design-build community and forest product manufacturers to procure tribal forest products.

Storytelling and communications to showcase tribal forestry efforts and achievements including:

Developing compelling marketing and storytelling materials such as videos, photography, blog posts, and social media content.
Develop marketing campaigns aimed at elevating the vision, efforts, and impacts of tribal forestry.
Assist tribes in developing and sharing public facing forest impact reports.

Marketing Incentives

As part of this grant we are pleased to be able to offer partner tribes a variety of financial incentives for contributing tribal staff and community time to technical assistance, marketing, and storytelling projects. In addition, qualifying tribes may receive a premium incentive for sales of climate-smart forest products.

*Please note that in order to receive any Incentive payments, tribes are required to have registration with the Farm Service Agency.

Photo credit: Jason Houston

Photo credit: Sam Beebe

Get in touch

For tribal forest managers or others who are interested in learning more about this work, contact Alexi Lovechio at alovechio@ecotrust.org.

About the Partnership for Climate Smart Commodities

Ecotrust is part of a coalition that has launched an ambitious “climate-smart” forestry initiative promoting forest health, climate resilience, and carbon storage. Climate-smart forestry combines science, local expertise, and ecological knowledge to foster forest management that will sustain our region for generations.

The grant, Partnership for Climate Smart Commodities, is bringing together tribal, small family forest, and nonprofit wood producers with data scientists and the design and construction industry to manage and restore tens of thousands of acres with an initial focus in Oregon, Washington, and northern California. The project is quantifying the positive impacts of climate-smart management on carbon sequestration, wildfire intensity, and cultural values. It will also develop new resources for leaders in the architecture, engineering, and construction communities to understand the importance of climate-smart forestry and to find sources of climate-smart wood through pre-design, design, and construction phases of development.