Development of a standard quantification methodology for avoided wildfire emissions

The Managed Forest Systems chapter within the 2024 USDA Entity Scale Guidelines for Greenhouse Gas Flux in Agriculture and Forestry provides standards and guidance for quantifying carbon impacts from forest management activities and serves as the formal guidance issued by the U.S. Government for project-level greenhouse gas accounting in the agriculture and forestry sector. To meet the growing greenhouse gas accounting needs of customers with limited technical background and data, the 2024 update to the Forest Management Chapter offers a continuum of ‘levels’ of precision and technical complexity. While the basic ‘Level 1’ approach for quantifying fire emissions provides default estimates of contiguous U.S.-wide fire emissions along a range of fire severity scenarios, a fully articulated ‘Level 3’ approach has yet to be fully documented. Developing this standard documentation and guidance and expanding the ‘Level 1’ approach to account for a greater range of scenarios reflecting future fire probabilities would be of enormous value to the Forest Service and other federal, state, and private land managers in decision-making around planning for and measuring the impacts of wildfire management strategies. Two ORISE fellows will support the lead authors of the fire components of the chapter to fully articulate a ‘Level 3’ approach for quantifying avoided wildfire emissions. They will develop step-by-step guidance on how to produce custom modeled simulations to estimate how mitigation efforts such as fuel treatment and prescribed fire affect emissions and carbon pools post-treatment.