The Forest Health Human Health Initiative

Rates of health care coverage are low across much of rural America and  what coverage many landowners do have often proves to be inadequate over  the long-term. What does this mean for the 45% of private forest land  in America that is owned by people 65 years or older? These aging  landowners and their children face difficult realities regarding the  costs of long-term. Pinchot Institute research indicates that medical  care expenses landowners are unable to afford, or do not want to pass on  to their children, are major drivers of forestland conversion and  unsustainable management in the U.S. Interviews of over 1,000 pairs of  landowners and children across five states, point specifically to  long-term care and catastrophic medical events as being a central  financial concern that weighs into landowner decisions about their  forest.  

The aim of the Forest Health-Human Health Initiative is to address the root concerns of forest landowners by directly connecting innovative health coverage options with new markets for forest carbon.
 

The key to the Forest Health-Human Health Initiative is adding value to every unit of carbon transacted through the Initiative. The Initiative does this in several ways:
 

• Guaranteeing that payments to landowners and their families occur in the form of health coverage.
• Providing a carbon credit payment flow that results in potential tax deductions for both the landowner and carbon credit buyers.
• Evaluating innovative technologies and methods for reducing the cost of measuring, documenting, and verifying changes in forest carbon stock.
• Connecting an emerging generation of forest landowners back to  their land who traditionally are less interested in, or lack skills in,  managing their family forest.

Following on a series of forest landowner interviews across the country,  the Pinchot Institute began to explore ways to address the top issues landowners identified. In early 2009, the Pinchot Institute began scoping of a Forest Health-Human Health pilot in Oregon and Washington. With funding from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the Kelley Family Foundation, Meyer Memorial Trust, and Regence Blue Cross Blue Shield of Oregon, the Pinchot Institute is testing this concept with a group of family forest owners in western Oregon.  

The Pinchot Institute is working with a number of key partners to continue to shape this program, and market it to both forest landowners, and a potentially significant new source of demand in the carbon market; the health care industry.
 

The pilot phase of the Forest Health-Human Health Initiative is occurring in the private forests around the community of Vernonia in Columbia County, Oregon. Located in Oregon’s Coast Range, Vernonia (population 2,380), is surrounded by some of the most productive forestland in the nation. In the midst of adjusting to an economy that is transitioning away from being purely natural resource-based, Vernonia has been devastated by two 500-year floods in the last eleven years (1996 and 2007). The community is now in the process of rebuilding itself on a platform of rural sustainability. Given Vernonia’s strong cultural and economic connection to forests, there continues to be significant interest in the Initiative among area landowners, making Vernonia an ideal place to pilot a Forest Health-Human Health program.