The Nature Conservancy’s Working Woodlands program leverages the power of The University of Tennessee’s forests by improving forest health, maximizing the potential for carbon sequestration, and helping fight climate change.
The primary objective of the Climate Smart Forestry Program is to collect baseline data about the forests, enable calculations to predict future growth and carbon sequestration rates and provide models for UTIA researchers, professors and students to utilize for building and sharing knowledge on carbon sequestration and climate smart forestry applications.
Forest Carbon Project
This project supports the following United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs):
- Goal 4 | UT will incorporate the project into teaching curricula and establish a Climate Smart Forestry Fund to train students in sustainable forestry and carbon offsetting technical and vocational skills, translating to valuable new services that are currently scarce in the workforce.
- Goal 6 | The forests lie in the headwaters of the Tennessee River and Cumberland River watersheds. A rigorous and certified forest management plan will protect and restore water-related ecosystems, including mountains, forests, wetlands, rivers, and lakes.
- Goal 13 | Healthy, diverse forests like these can better resist the impacts of a changing climate, while also mitigating rising temperatures through enhanced carbon sequestration and storage.
- Goal 15 | By integrating ecosystem and biodiversity values into forest management plans and certifying the forests under TNC’s Forest Stewardship Council® (FSC®-C008922) certificate, the University will ensure the conservation, restoration, and sustainable use of mountain forest ecological systems and their services.