Forest Industry Lecture Series
Pam Jagger, FILS speaker, March 6, 2025
Robert Froese, Stacy Bergheim, Bruno Wichmann, FILS commitee
Barb Thomas, Nadir Erbilgin, and Ellen Macdonald
Peter meets Peter - Student Volunteers meet the AMAZING Dr. Peter Blenis
Marty Luckert, Pam Jagger, and Vic Adamowicz
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Lecture Abstract
Avoided deforestation and reduced forest degradation in low-income countries is hailed as one of the lowest cost options for mitigating climate change. The premise is simple, get people to stop clearing forests and woodlands for agriculture and relying exclusively on biomass as a sole source of household energy, and the sequestered carbon will slow the advance of global warming. Policy makers, donors, and governments have implemented this agenda in sub-Saharan Africa primarily through two mechanisms, reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation projects (REDD+) and the verification of carbon offsets associated with household energy projects that shift people from biomass to more efficient technologies or clean fuels. Twenty years after the idea of forest-based climate mitigation emerged, what do we know about its impacts on forests and on the people impacted by these policies? The evidence on the impact of REDD+ projects in Africa is mixed and illustrates the very stark trade-offs required for people in rural areas to change their livelihood strategies to activities that do not require new land. The promise of household energy transitions as a mechanism for avoiding deforestation is tempered by evidence that biomass fuel savings are exaggerated and by scrutiny of certification systems that overstate avoided deforestation. Are we asking too much of forests and people in places where there are few alternative livelihood strategies to farming and where markets for new household energy technologies and fuels are weak or missing? Should we reconsider the potential of forests as a low-cost mitigation option given what we know now?
Speaker Biography
Pam Jagger is a global leader in interdisciplinary population and environment research. She is an applied political economist whose research focuses on the dynamics of poverty and environment interactions in low-income countries. She leads the interdisciplinary Forest Use, Energy, and Livelihoods (FUEL) Lab, and is the Director of the National Science Foundation funded Energy Poverty PIRE in Southern Africa (EPPSA), a 5-year collaborative program to support research and training on the topic of energy access in Southern Africa. FUEL Lab research is currently organized around three themes: environment and livelihoods, environmental governance, and energy poverty. The first theme focuses on quantifying the role of forests and the other environmental resources in household consumption and income generation, and understanding how contributions change in response to land use land cover change, implementation of conservation and development projects, and population dynamics. The second theme examines the livelihood impacts of changes in environmental governance and institutions on access to environmental goods and services. The third theme examines household energy access including understanding the effectiveness of interventions designed to mitigate energy poverty and improve access to electricity and cleaner cooking and novel research questions related to the effects of land cover and land use change on energy access and human health. Dr. Jagger has worked as a policy research scholar with the World Bank, Resources for the Future, the International Food Policy Research Institute, and the Center for International Forestry Research.
Questions? Contact Stacy Bergheim, FILS Coordinator, Department of Renewable Resources at (780) 492-0447 or email: fils@ualberta.ca
FILS History
The Forest Industry Lecture Series (FILS) began and developed as a collaborative event by members of the forestry community in Alberta to enrich the forestry program at the University of Alberta. The first forestry class enrolled in Fall of 1970, initiated as a faculty program through the vision of Fenton MacHardy, then Dean of Agriculture. In 1975, Allan A. Warrack, then Minister of Lands and Forests in the new Peter Lougheed government, made an offer to Dean MacHardy, saying that he had done well in developing the forestry program, but students needed enrichment through speakers from outside who could bring in fresh insights. The offer was that his department would match any outside funds the faculty could raise to support a position or lecture series.
Several of the larger forest products companies in western Canada immediately responded and for two years, 1975 and 1976, this new outside funding supported two visiting lecturers: Maxwell MacLaggan and Desmond I. Crossley, whose expertise were respectively: forest industry, logging and forest products; silviculture and forest management.
In the meantime, Arden A. Rytz encouraged the sawmilling and plywood industries to add their support through the Alberta Forest Products Association (AFPA), of which he was executive director. Rytz was a forester, graduating from UBC after wartime service in southeast Asia. This collaborative approach to shared funding enables this lecture series to achieve the success it enjoys today.
The first designated Forest Industry Lecture was in 1977 by the Canadian, internationally respected forester Ross Silversides, who spoke on industrial forestry in a changing Canada. The university and the Department of Renewable Resources, in particular, deeply appreciate the support of its many sponsors.
The above information was written
by the late Peter Murphy.