Send Benchmarks to the Bench

From Andy Stahl

It’s Friday before a three-day weekend, so here’s a short one. Twenty-eight years ago, while serving on the National Forest Products Association’s federal land planning task force, I suggested a way to use the FORPLAN model to calculate the timber opportunity cost from environmental protection. First, have FORPLAN calculate the maximum sustained yield of timber assuming no discretionary environmental protection. Second, sequentially impose environmental protections – the timber volume difference between the two is the opportunity cost of protecting the environment. Forest Planning published my article (thanks Randal) and Doug MacCleery took it with him when he made his move from NFPA to USDA as Deputy Assistant Secretary of Agriculture in the Reagan Administration. In 1982, Doug re-wrote the Carter Administration’s 1979 NFMA rules and added benchmark analysis as a planning requirement.

Benchmark analysis had only one purpose – to highlight the cost of protecting wildlife habitat, ensuring clean water, and keeping the forest pretty for people to enjoy. The thought being that if people, and decisionmakers (like OMB), only knew the dollars they were giving up, they would rally around increased national forest logging. But it was not to be. When it comes to public forests, no opportunity cost appears too high to pay for their protection.

I’m delighted to add my nail to the benchmark analysis coffin. Forest planning is challenging enough without adding gratuitous and divisive analysis that provides no information of real use to national forest managers or the public.

Post- Normal Science in Action-Climate Example from Pielke

I always think it’s fun to hop back and forth between climate change discussions and planning discussions. Especially since we need to think about how to handle climate change in forest plans. Which I would address by using general scenarios (another post) and relatively few general, qualitative predictions.

Conveniently, Roger Pielke just posted an example of a scientific paper, response by reviewers, his responses, and blog comments here.

I also noted this quote

An assessment built upon questions provided by policymakers would create a close tie between the information demanded by decision makers and that being produced in assessments . .

Relating back to forest planning, wouldn’t it be more efficient and effective to analyze specific questions posed by land managers and the public than to attempt to do a more or less comprehensive assessment in a plan revision?