NEFF Heads to NYC Climate Week 2025

New York City’s Climate Week has just kicked off, and it offers a platform for inspiration and action among the scientists, innovators, implementers, activists, educators and investors that seek to address and mitigate the warming of our planet — and New England Forestry Foundation is attending.

In an era where climate action needs to be driven by less centralized and more entrepreneurial initiatives, NEFF will use this opportunity to build partnerships, explore emerging science, identify new ways to scale our work in climate-smart forestry, and build our understanding of how to grow low-carbon markets.

A small (but always mighty!) team of NEFF staff will bring the potential of New England’s forests into these discussions through select events. We will focus on issues central to the role of forests in helping to absorb and store carbon and mitigate climate change.

• Jen Shakun, NEFF’s Bioeconomy Initiative Director, has again been invited to the Living Future Marketplace’s Roundtable on Biobased Construction. Industry leaders will explore how to establish new norms for design and construction that support a shift to biobased and low-carbon materials. Participants will examine how to build supply chains and scale this emerging sector that can provide good jobs and expanded markets for bio-based materials like wood as used in mass timber or woodblock insulation.
• Ryan Owens, NEFF’s Executive Director, will join a session on ‘Avoided Forest Conversion: Building a Coalition for Targeted Policies and Protections for Forests at Risk.’ Hosted by the Open Space Institute, this session will explore how to translate data on forest loss and related emissions into tools and policies to advance forest conservation as a critical Natural Climate Solution.
• Collen Ryan, NEFF’s Forest Scientist, and me, Andi Colnes, have been invited to join American Forests’ session on “Modeling and Policy Analysis for Climate-Smart Forestry.” This session will kickstart a conversation for how to define, model and document the benefits of climate-smart forestry with a nationwide group of experts. This session is hosted by the Doris Duke Foundation, a key supporter of bringing climate-smart forestry forward in policy and practice as a natural climate solution.

I’ll also participate in multiple events hosted by Yale’s Planetary Solutions program, including a focus on the critical issue of “natural carbon capture” and the potential for forests to draw carbon out of the atmosphere and store it in the forest as well as in wood products that are part of the bioeconomy.  Carbon dioxide removal is now recognized globally as essential for meeting climate targets, and our forests here in New England and across the country offer the only effective, existing, scalable mechanism to do this. I will also attend a session on how we can de-carbonize our building stock and lower embodied carbon, as the built environment is responsible for roughly 42 percent of global human-generated carbon emissions.

So, take this journey with us! Through this blog, with a wrap-up post to follow, and our social media posts live from the event, we invite you to join NEFF in the field as we explore how forests can be a powerful part of climate action. Readers can follow along on Instagram, where NEFF’s attendees will share their experiences live from the event.