As the glorious fall colors cause even longtime New Englanders to stop and admire our forests, it is worth considering what role our forests can play in solving two major challenges facing our region and country: the economy and climate change. The great news is that New Hampshire's forests can significantly slow climate change by sequestering more carbon, and we can create much needed jobs in rural areas by paying landowners to undertake this work of "harvesting" additional carbon in our forests.

This win-win opportunity could be realized through climate change legislation that is under consideration in the U.S. Senate. Forests in New Hampshire and elsewhere can play a key role in solving the climate problem if Congress creates strong incentives for forest owners to participate in any new carbon mitigation programs.

The main cause of climate change is the buildup of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, which acts like glass in a greenhouse, allowing sunlight in but also trapping heat created when that same sunlight radiates back off the earth. Current projections suggest that this will make New Hampshire's climate feel like Virginia or North Carolina by the end of the century.

Absorbing pollution

America's forests help slow climate change by absorbing 10 percent of our carbon dioxide emissions each year from smokestacks, tailpipes and elsewhere. More remarkably, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency says we could double that figure to 20 percent by protecting and better managing our forests.

Congress can encourage this activity and create economic opportunities by providing incentives for management and conservation activities that capture and store more carbon. For example, New Hampshire forest owners could change management to increase the volume of trees, use low-impact harvest techniques that disturb less soil, and put forests under permanent conservation easement to halt development. These steps will help build carbon stores in forests and protect those stores for the long term.

To maximize these opportunities, climate legislation should create two new tools work with private forest owners. First, owners who can show each ton of "real, additional, permanent, verifiable and enforceable" carbon absorption should be able to sell those extra reductions as "offsets" to utilities and others who can use the offsets in place of carbon emission permits.

Help for landowners

The second tool would help landowners who are willing to undertake new activities but cannot precisely or affordably detail carbon reductions to earn offsets they can sell. To engage them, we need a supplemental carbon incentives program to reward landowners on a per-acre basis for adopting practices that have been shown to increase carbon uptake and protect stored carbon. This approach, modeled on traditional federal incentive programs, would be particularly beneficial for New Hampshire's many family forest owners, who might have difficulty participating in offset markets.

Fortunately, New Hampshire's legislators support these incentives. Sen. Jeanne Shaheen has teamed with Sen. Olympia Snowe of Maine to sponsor legislation that would pay private forest landowners to undertake carbon-friendly management. In addition, the program would enable interested landowners to sell a permanent conservation easement on their lands to protect stored carbon. Earlier this year, Reps. Paul Hodes and Carol Shea-Porter led similar efforts in the House.

If federal climate legislation includes these kinds of steps for catching and storing carbon in our forests, America has a real chance to reduce the impact of climate change. As the nation's second most densely forested state, New Hampshire has a particular opportunity to lead this effort and help the state's landowners at the same time.

(Jad Daley of Hardwick, Vt., directs the Climate Conservation Program for The Trust for Public Land.)