Solving Bottlenecks to Forest Restoration

Kodama Systems helps forests adapt to climate change and sustain future generations. With the announcement of a grant from Frontier Climate for our biomass carbon removal pilot project, we’d like to start sharing our approach.

First, some context. Beginning over a century ago, indigenous burning practices were banned, intensive logging started, and fire suppression policies enabled the growth of small, densely spaced trees instead of healthy, fire-resistant forests. Today, because of these factors, forests are overly dense. Coupled with climate change and increased human activity in the wildland-urban interface, these conditions have led to wildfires reaching unprecedented scales, more frequently. There’s even a name for the huge fires — “megafires,” which burn more than 100,000 acres. To address this challenge, the United States Forest Service released its Wildfire Crisis Implementation Plan in January 2022. It aims to restore federal, state, and private forestlands to their traditional splendor.

A major part of the plan is increasing the pace and scale of forest thinning. Thinning densely stocked forests increases the spacing between trees while reducing fuel loads, resource competition, and water stress. The remaining trees are more resilient to wildfire, climate change, and provide a cascade of other benefits to forest ecosystems and people. Across forest types and climate regimes, the benefits of managed restoration in fire-prone forests are compelling.

Ecologically Managed Forests: By thinning the forest understory, we can safely reintroduce fire as a restorative process. Fire has been excluded from the forest on the left. The forest on the right has undergone Ecological Forest Restoration. Image and caption reprinted with permission. © TNC\Erica Simek Sloniker

There are two major bottlenecks hindering a faster pace and scale of forest thinning treatments. First, the forestry labor force is decreasing when we need it to grow. Second, there is a lack of valuable uses for woody residues (i.e. small-diameter logs, branches, and needles). The current best practice for most thinning treatments is to stack this unmerchantable biomass in piles and burn it. A recent report from the California Governor’s Office of Planning and Research highlights that less than 20% of available woody biomass across the state is utilized, with the rest being burned or decomposing.

This is where we come in. Kodama is a full-stack forest restoration team addressing the workforce bottleneck by improving the productivity of thinning treatments and streamlining biomass supply chains. Given limited options for biomass utilization today, we went to first principles to explore solutions to the biomass bottleneck. Core challenges across utilizations include the difficulty of breaking wood down chemically, low energy yields, inconsistent quality, and distribution across broad regions. We determined an ideal solution would remove landscape risk without adding any greenhouse gases to the atmosphere, minimize biomass transportation requirements, and have low financing costs.

Since woody residues are carbon-dense (50% carbon by dry weight), we realized there is high value for engineered carbon dioxide removal, or CDR (if you have questions about the value proposition here, we recommend starting with the CDR primer, and then go deep with this paper). There are promising technologies for high-value uses of forest residues on the horizon. These include engineered wood products, industrial chemicals, fuels, and advanced bioenergy coupled with geologic carbon dioxide storage. Today, many of these technologies face similar headwinds:

• Centralized facilities are vulnerable to feedstock supply loss under the current wildfire risk paradigm
• Debt financing centralized facilities is difficult given constraints on long-term feedstock supply agreements
• Many of these technologies have long development timelines
• There are uncertain and complex markets for the end products
• Require high capital investment

After a thorough analysis of emerging utilizations, we determined wood vaults are compelling today because they leverage the inherent durability of wood, handle inconsistent quality, and:

• Enable decentralized facilities matching treatment project scale
• Are low-capital investment
• Produce a single product (CDR credits) with a simple market, at costs lower than other near-term solutions
• Offer a carbon-beneficial alternative if other biomass utilization technologies do not scale quickly
• Create new landforms made mostly of natural materials, designed to be congruent with local environments, which may be deployed in parallel with mine reclamation

Kodama’s pilot will address fundamental questions about the durability of wood vault CDR technology in partnership with Yale Carbon Containment Lab. The Frontier grant’s scope focuses on vault construction, carbon storage monitoring and verification, and establishing the legal and regulatory framework to ensure wood vaults perform over geologic time. If you want to know more, our Frontier application details the rationale behind our both pilot project and wood vaults more broadly.

If you’re interested in working on helping forests adapt to climate change and reducing megafire risk, Kodama is hiring across multiple roles listed here.