Take Action for 2022 Legislation
TAKE ACTION TODAY
Natural & Working Lands Bill needs your help to pass!
Oregon’s legislative session ends in less than 2 weeks!
We need your help to help pass SB 1534-A, the Natural and Working Lands Bill.
Beyond Toxics and our partners are working hard to advance the Natural and Working Lands Bill (SB 1534A) this legislative session. Oregon needs to adopt better stewardship practices for our natural and working lands like our forests, farms, and wetlands. This legislation will help ensure Oregon’s natural and working lands can be used to fight climate change! Our legislators need to know you support this vitally important legislation. We need your help TODAY!
What’s at stake?
Natural climate solutions are essential to addressing the climate and biodiversity crises our state faces today. This bill will lay the foundation for future incentives programs that encourage landowners to shift to better practices that enable more carbon sequestration, protect fish and wildlife, and ensure social equity and a better quality of life for Oregonians. SB 1534A is rooted in better stewardship of our natural and working lands.
Further, the bill ensures principles of environmental justice are centered throughout efforts to make both our natural and working lands and communities more resilient. We must remind lawmakers that this initiative follows through on the strong commitments legislators made last year when they passed Senate Concurrent Resolution 17.
SB 1534A is beginning to face strong opposition in the short session by special interest groups who prefer to maintain the status quo and don’t want new science, data, and incentives programs to modernize Oregon’s approach to land management. Please help us stand up for strong climate policy and get this bill safely over the finish line.
How you can get involved
Please contact your legislators and ask them to pass SB 1534A!
OVERVIEW
SB 1534A
Title: Relating to biological carbon sequestration; prescribing an effective date.
Description: Establishes state policy to increase carbon sequestration in natural and working lands and waters.
Chief Sponsors: Printed pursuant to Senate Interim Rule 213.28 by order of the President of the Senate in conformance with presession filing rules, indicating neither advocacy nor opposition on the part of the President.
Our position: Beyond Toxics supports SB 1534A, which will provide a framework and resources for the Oregon Global Warming Commission’s carbon sequestration recommendations to begin to be implemented in Oregon. SB 1534A lays the foundation for the creation of voluntary, incentive-based programs to increase carbon sequestration and resilience on Oregon’s natural and working lands (NWL). Oregon can and should make investments in the future to protect rural economies, fish and wildlife, and precious drinking water supplies as we navigate changing environmental conditions.
Read the OCAP testimony in support of SB 1534
also: Read Increasing Carbon Sequestration on Oregon’s Natural and Working Lands (PDF; Oregon Global Warming Commission January 2022)
