Natural carbon sinks can help mitigate climate change, but climate risks—like increased wildfire—threaten forests’ capacity to store carbon. California has recently set ambitious forest management goals to reduce these risks. However, management can incur carbon losses because wood residues are often burnt or left to decay. In this talk, I will present my dissertation work that applies a systems approach to assess climate change mitigation potential and wildfire outcomes across forest management scenarios and several uses for harvested wood. Then I will explore how this academic work has evolved to interface with policy and industry.
Dr. Bodie Cabiyo is a Research Scientist at the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment and a Science Advisor at Carbon Direct Inc. In both roles, he engages practitioners and researchers to build more credible carbon market structures, including through coalition building. Bodie's academic work bridges industrial ecology, forest economics, and forest ecology. He completed his Ph.D. in the UC Berkeley Energy and Resources Group in 2022, where he was an NSF Graduate Research Fellow. Bodie will usually abandon his desk after snowstorms in the Sierras, or just on sunny afternoons when he’d rather be trail running.