When people think of deforestation, they often think of rainforests, maybe the amazon. It is easy to forget that deforestation is happening all around us, even in the United States. Many rural areas with less dense forestry are taken out due to development, agriculture, logging, among other reasons.
The Bobryk forest in Massachusetts was privately owned until 2020 when The Nature Conservancy, the Berkshire Natural Resources Council and the state of Massachusetts put Bobryk forest into conservation to protect it from development. Forest ecologist at The Nature Conservancy in Massachusetts, Laura Marx claims that this effort kept 136,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide in the tree's trunks and preserved the ability for the trees in the Bobryk forest to store 190 metric tons of carbon dioxide each year.
The Bobryk forest is 300 acres, which comparatively speaking is small. Many people overlook the importance of these small forests in the United States, but the Bobryk forest proves that preserving these forests have a positive impact on our environment and can even counteract carbon emissions.
In 2021 Massachusetts governor Charlie Baker signed An Act Creating a Next Generation Roadmap for Massachusetts Climate Policy. The act aims for "net zero" emissions by 2050. Deforestation heavily contributes to climate change, and even produces 6 to 17 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions.
58% of U.S. forests are privately owned, 20% corporate potentially already planning to contribute to deforestation efforts, and 38% individually owned. Conservation easement is a common way governments can protect privately owned land from deforestation. Conservation easement works as an agreement between land trusts and individual land owners, these agreements include financial incentives either compensation or tax benefits.
Massachusetts has been losing roughly 5,000 acres of forest each year to development. Much of that is conversion for housing and industrial uses; however, we are seeing more and more forests cut down for installation of ground-mounted solar arrays. One solution proposed by Mass Audubon is to install solar-arrays on top of preexisting buildings.