There's a cool paper from a large team of scientists from American Forests, the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, Michigan State U, and the US Forest Service. They note that California's forests have become a net source of carbon, releasing more carbon into the atmosphere due to factors like worsening wildfires than they sequester through new growth, and look for ways to lessen that problem in the long-term. The picture is pretty bleak – climate change poses the risk of California losing half of its forestland and associated carbon storage this century.
The scientists conclude that these numbers can be lessened through a combination of practices:
The Fix Our Forests Act notably includes some measures to help advance these practices, like helping to expedite wildfire resilience treatments and encouraging biochar innovations.
The paper finds that implementing all these measures in what they call the “Max Natural Climate Solutions (NCS)” scenario (light purple, below) can preserve a lot of California forest land and reduce the amount of carbon the state's forests release into the atmosphere.
One key point is that if we're generating a lot more biomass, either by thinning forests or by removing burned trees during post-fire landscape restoration, we have to do something with that biomass besides just piling and burning it (which is the current main practice). That means expanding some innovative wood products like biochar, lumber (and more wood buildings), and potentially biofuels.
I think the conclusion of the paper is informative. Apologies that I have to post it as an image; the report PDF doesn't allow text copying:
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