A broad range of environmental and conservation groups have come together in support of a proposed bill providing tax incentives to conserve wild forest lands on private property.
Environmental and conservation groups have come together in support of a new bill to provide tax incentives to landowners to help them protect their wild forest lands. Maintaining mature wild forests conserves wildlife habitat, protections air and water quality and soil health, and helps to fight climate change by sequestering and storing carbon. Permanently protecting forest lands will also help New York meet its statutory goal of conserving 30 percent of lands in the state by 2030 pursuant to the 30 by 30 Act.
The new proposed bill would provide real property tax incentives to landowners who place permanent conservation easements on their forested lands. State law currently provides real property tax reductions for landowners who manage a minimum number of acres of their land for timber production for a period of at least ten years pursuant to a timber management plan approved by the Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC). Landowners who meet these criteria receive an exemption of up to 80 percent of the assessed valuation of the lands subject to the approved timber management plan.
The new bill would provide the same real property tax relief for landowners who place at least ten acres of forested land under a conservation easement that ensures that the tract will be permanently maintained as wild forest land and prohibits the cutting, removal or destruction of trees on the tract (with certain exemptions such as DEC-approved actions to address invasive species).
Protecting wild forests on private lands and keeping them growing intact while reducing carbon in the atmosphere will help to achieve the goals of the 2019 Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act (CLCPA). Forests absorb and store carbon dioxide that can offset greenhouse gas emissions and reduce the impacts of climate change. According to the New York State Climate Action Council, New York’s forests store an estimated 1,911 million metric tons (MMT) of carbon—ten times more than the amount of carbon emitted from the State’s energy sector annually—and sequester approximately 26.6 MMT of carbon dioxide annually.
Around 70%, or 13.7 million acres, of New York forest lands are owned by private landowners and the majority of all the carbon storage and sequestration in the State occurs on these lands. This new bill incentivizing permanent protection of private forest lands will benefit landowners across the State and in the Adirondack Park where there are millions of acres of privately owned forests that are at risk of conversion to non-forestry uses. New York’s Climate Action Council Scoping Plan (at 277 in Chapter 15) specifically recommends promoting multiple forest management strategies including timber harvesting and “leaving mature forests intact” for the purpose of “carbon sequestration, storage, and climate resilience”.
In addition, the New York Forest Carbon Assessment Summary Report funded by DEC and prepared by the Climate & Applied Forest Research Institute in 2023 (Summary Report) concludes that New York needs to “double the size of its current forest carbon sink by 2050”, and that “avoiding forest loss is arguably New York’s first and most critical strategy to sustainably expand its forest carbon sink”. Summary Report at 5, 18. The Summary Report (at 18) “found that most forest loss since 1990 has occurred on . . . privately owned forest lands across NYS” where “‘family forest owners’ face economic challenges in maintaining forest land as forested and increasing development pressures to convert forest lands to non-forest uses”. These family-owned forests (10-150 acres in size), which are the most at risk to conversion to non-forest uses, provide significant opportunities for forest carbon sequestration benefits.
Proportion of Statewide Forest Carbon Sequestration (1990-2019) by Parcel Size
Privately-owned forests in parcels of 10 to 150 acres provide 60% of statewide forest sequestration benefits. Credit: New York Forest Carbon Assessment Summary Report, Climate & Applied Forest Research Institute, June 2023.
Research demonstrates that the lands with the highest potential for carbon sequestration and storage in the near-term, that should be prioritized with policies and incentivizes that protect them, are those that already have mature standing forests. Standing forests store much more carbon than young forests subject to forest management programs (i.e., timber harvesting), and studies show that the rate of carbon sequestration in standing forests is just as high as, if not more than, the rate of carbon sequestration in managed forests. Research by the Climate & Applied Forest Research Institute found that State-owned Forest Preserve lands that are protected by the NYS Constitution and cannot be managed for timber harvests exhibit greater carbon storage than privately-owned lands in the Adirondacks. In addition, the research found that privately-owned “working [forests] and [Forest Preserve] lands across the [Adirondack] Park have very similar average rates of [carbon] sequestration”.
Other research shows that the “actual annual amount of carbon increase is small in the early years” of a growing tree, while carbon gain in an older tree is significant; forests with trees that are between 80 to 140 years old sequester more carbon than forests with trees 0-20 years old. Leverett, Robert T. (Bob) (2023), Carbon Sequestered and Stored in Young Versus Old Forests in the Adirondacks. It has also been documented that mature forests “typically continue to sequester additional carbon for many decades or even centuries, and sequester significantly more carbon than younger and managed stands”. Moomaw WR, Masino SA and Faison EK (2019) Intact Forests in the United States: Proforestation Mitigates Climate Change and Serves the Greatest Good. This is because the older trees, as compared to younger ones, have a larger total leaf area and more overall mass that can be used to sequester and store carbon.
“The power of forests in [keeping carbon out of the atmosphere] is unparalleled and far greater in old forests than in young forests, both above and below ground; carbon continues to accumulate for centuries. The amount of carbon lost when cutting a mature or old-growth forest is not recovered by fast-growing young forests for many decades to well over a century”. Kellett MJ, Maloof JE, Masino SA, Frelich LE, Faison EK, Brosi SL and Foster DR (2023) Forest-clearing to create early-successional habitats: Questionable benefits, significant costs.
Finally, the bill provides state assistance to municipalities that lose real property tax revenues as a result of landowners enrolling in the timber management or conservation easement tax relief programs. Currently, municipalities often make up for the lost tax revenues by collecting more real property taxes from landowners who are not enrolled in a tax relief program, leading to inequitable real property taxation. The proposed bill would tap state revenues collected by the real property transfer tax to provide state assistance to municipalities to remedy this problem. The State assistance will secure the Statewide benefits of forest protection and safeguard local municipalities and local taxpayers from being unfairly burdened by these tax incentives.
There are over 12 million acres of forested lands across New York in tracts of 10 acres or more that could be protected with the incentive provided by this bill. The following groups are urging the Legislature to take up this initiative immediately and pass the proposed bill before the legislative session ends: Land Trust Alliance, Earthjustice, NRDC, Protect the Adirondacks!, NOFA-NY, Western New York Land Conservancy, New York League of Conservation Voters, Sierra Club Atlantic Chapter, Adirondack Wild: Friends of the Forest Preserve, and Scenic Hudson.
