Forest Conservation Act, Data Centers and the VCA

Tree canopies play a crucial role in supporting environmental and human health. A tree canopy is the upper layer crowns of trees- branches, foliage and leaves. It shades the ground below, providing a continuous cover created by the branches and foliage of multiple trees. Tree canopies provide shade, sheltering wildlife, regulating temperatures (through shade and evapotranspiration), intercepting rainfall, and contributing to air purification by absorbing carbon dioxide and releasing oxygen through photosynthesis. In urban environments, the tree canopy enhances streetscapes aesthetically and improves the overall environmental quality by reducing heat and stormwater flow.

Healthy forests and the urban tree canopy are essential. Urban heat island (UHI) effect is widely recognized as a heat accumulation phenomenon, which is caused by urban construction and tree removal. Healthy, well-managed forests are essential to our economy and provide benefits to people and wildlife in Virginia. Forest loss is also responsible for deterioration of rivers and streams.

Yet, Virginians continue to lose trees at an alarming rate. Virginia’s tree canopy decreased 19% from 2001-2023. The loss of tree canopies diminishes our environment’s capacity to filter water pollutants and reduce air pollution and smog. Trees release fresh oxygen to breathe as the canopy layer provides shade and cools the air, which can reduce pollution levels and lower energy usage in buildings, cutting emissions from power plants. When forests are cut down, they release carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases that trap heat. The new Forest Conservation Act pinpoints where critical tree canopy loss is occurring to mitigate the effects of extreme heat and pollution.

In 2023 Virginia passed the Forest Conservation Act to address the loss of trees facing Virginia’s tree canopies and forests. The law requires the Department of Forestry to conduct comprehensive assessments of the health of Virginia’s forests and explore the various factors contributing to forest loss, such as increased development, invasive species, road construction, and other infrastructure projects.

The Forest Conservation Act and the Forestland and Urban Tree Canopy Conservation Plan are vital steps towards reducing deforestation, reducing tree canopy loss, and maintaining the health of our landscapes and human communities.  Given the alarming loss of Virginia’s tree canopies, having transparent data on where the loss is happening is essential to guide targeted restoration efforts. Beyond temperature regulation, tree canopies serve as natural buffer zones, preventing polluted water from entering our rivers and streams. Tree roots stabilize soil, reduce erosion, and filter out water contaminants. 

Loosing nearly a fifth of our tree canopy in a small number of years has exacerbated extreme heat waves and the urban heat island effect. In Virginia, the top 11 regions for forest loss were responsible for almost 405 of all tree cover loss between 2001 and 2023. When I looked this up, I expected to see counties with tremendous urbanization pushes, but instead I found predominantly rural counties at the top of the list. Brunswick County had the most tree cover loss at 60.7 kha compared to an average of 9.83 kha. Brunswick was followed by Pittsylvania, Halifax, Buckingham and Sussex. It turns out that all these counties were home to millions of solar panels. We had cut down trees to build solar farms.

In 2020, the General Assembly passed the Virginia Clean Economy Act (VCEA), which mandated a goal of 100% zero-carbon energy generation by 2050 and prescribed increasingly strict Renewable Portfolio Standards (RPS) for Virginia's investor-owned electric utilities.  The energy needs of the Commonwealth, its businesses and its families are changing – and growing at an unprecedented rate.

Virginia is already the data center capital of the world, and the industry is exploding along with the demand for more and more electricity 24 hours a day 7 days a week needed to run them. Data centers require power all the time even when the wind does not blow or the sun does not shine, requiring greater and greater amounts of solar panels, wind turbines and backup power supply and storage.  

Forests and solar energy are both critical to achieving a sustainable climate. However, large-scale deployment of solar farms requires vast land areas, potentially posing conflicts with other land uses. Solar farms have been built in forested regions with a direct reduction in the forest canopy. The clearance of forests and stripping of old growth woods appears to be an obvious source of land for the realization of climate mitigation through solar farm expansion and increased energy needs through data center construction. However, forests also provide climate mitigation as a nature-based solution.

Forests not only absorb approximately a third of the carbon dioxide emitted from burning fossil fuel worldwide each year by sequestering carbon as woody aboveground biomass (Liang et al., 2023), but also provide abundant ecological services such as oxygen release, air purification, soil and water conservation, and biodiversity conservation.

Given the acknowledged importance of forests in shaping policies and decisions related to climate mitigation and achieving carbon neutrality, it becomes evident that building solar farms over forests and knocking down old growth trees for data centers entails substantial environmental expenses including visual impact, land use competition, reduced species richness and increased carbon emission (Ko, 2023; Oudes and Stremke, 2021; Rehbein et al., 2020; Turney and Fthenakis, 2011). 

We need to coordinate our goals and aspirations. Both capping the number of data centers allowed in the Commonwealth and recasting of the VCEA timeline and goals are now necessary.