Forestry Investment Blog

A picture of economic growth and optimism was painted by three related working papers released by the University of Oregon’s Ecosystem Workforce Programme of the emerging field of forest and watershed restoration.

According to one of the papers as traditional forestry services such as tree planting are declining restoration work is on the up. The same study concludes that contractors who do restoration work for the state or nongovernmental organisations are happier about their opportunities than those who work for federal agencies.

According to another of the papers the jobs generated by restoration work in Oregon has resulted in numerous jobs in the state’s rural communities. This is despite the fact that traditional natural resource industries such as fishing, forestry and agriculture continues to dwarf the restoration sector.

“These studies suggest that public investments in forest and watershed restoration have similar, immediate economic and jobs payoffs to more traditional public infrastructure investments,” said Cassandra Moseley, director of the program. “In addition, these studies tell us that sustained investment by the Oregon Watershed Enhancement Board and other state and federal natural resource agencies has helped foster development of a forest and watershed restoration sector in Oregon,”

The Ecosystem Workforce Programme released the first paper yesterday, which discusses how contractors and watershed council employees implement watershed restoration projects. This involved interviewing coordinators from 52 of the non-government agencies.

The second paper involved a survey of 190 owners or managers of contracting businesses and profiles the contractors who do the bulk of the forest and watershed restoration work.

The third paper includes information from the 99 Oregon Watershed Enhancement Board grants along with the contractor survey and a separate sampling of watershed council coordinators to detail the employment and economic impacts of restoration work.

“As far as we know, this research is the first of its kind to look in-depth at the economic impacts of forest and watershed restoration,” Moseley said. “We combined information from extensive contractor interviews with fiscal data from watershed restoration grants to build a picture of how restoration contractors and projects create economic opportunity.”

The studies were conducted by the Ecosystem Workforce Programme faculty Max Nielsen-Pincus and Emily Jane Davis, and graduate assistants Fraser MacDonald and Autumn Ellison along with Moseley.

It should be noted though that the studies do not measure the amount spent each year on forest and watershed restoration projects in Oregon. However they did find that for every million dollars of public investment in restoration projects 16.7 jobs in Oregon are supported and multiplied 1.7 to 2.6 times by economic activity as it cycles through the state’s economy.

The reports provide insight into the types of businesses conducting restoration. One report found that contractors who worked mostly for the federal government were more likely to perceive a decline in forest and watershed work opportunities during the past decade. Conversely the same report found that contractors who worked for non-federal clients such as watershed councils found an increase in opportunities.

For more information on forestry investments please click here

This entry was posted on Monday, May 3rd, 2010 at 1:06 PM and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.