Climate risks rarely exist in isolation. Wildfire is tied to forest management, water, land use, housing, public finance, and local employment. Urban heat is tied to building design, vegetation, stormwater systems, public health, and infrastructure planning.

Josh Harrison, Director of the Center for the Study of the Force Majeure at the University of California, Santa Cruz, approaches these problems as parts of wider environmental and economic systems. In a conversation hosted by Net Zero Compare, he discussed wildfire resilience, forest restoration, mass timber, green infrastructure, and the practical barriers that often prevent climate adaptation projects from scaling.

🎥 Watch the Full Conversation: Watch the full interview with Josh Harrison for the complete discussion on wildfire resilience, forest management, mass timber, green roofs, stormwater abatement, and urban adaptation. The recording adds context to how these issues intersect and includes examples from California, New York, and other regions working to make forests and cities more resilient.

Climate Problems Need to Be Viewed as Systems

Harrison describes systems thinking in simple terms: environmental problems are interconnected. Forests, for example, cannot be understood only as collections of trees. They are part of landscapes shaped by soil, water, climate, vegetation, fire, wildlife, infrastructure, public agencies, and economic activity.

That changes how a problem such as wildfire should be approached. Looking only at fire probability or suppression capacity misses the condition of the landscape, the amount of combustible material, water availability, infrastructure exposure, insurance costs, and the ability to carry out preventive work.

For businesses and public agencies, the practical implication is straightforward. A single technology or isolated project may address one symptom without solving the underlying problem. Effective planning requires understanding how environmental, financial, regulatory, and social factors interact.

Wildfire Is More Than an Emergency Response Problem

Harrison explained that fire has historically played an ecological role in Mediterranean-type climates such as California and most of Southern Europe. These regions typically have short wet winters followed by long, dry summers, creating conditions in which vegetation grows quickly during the wet season but later becomes highly combustible.

For thousands of years, Indigenous communities in California used controlled burning to manage forest and other landscapes. In effect, they were gardening, or “tending” the forests. Small, intentional fires reduced excess vegetation, supported useful plants, created more open areas, and limited fuel accumulation.

European settlement brought a different approach. Fire was seen as an existential threat to the early settlers. Starting with the early Spanish missionaries and later the Europeans coming for the Gold Rush, setting fires became criminalized, and suppression became the dominant policy. Over time, this contributed to denser, more crowded forests that carried much larger quantities of combustible material, in some areas approaching an order of magnitude woodier biomass than a healthy landscape could support.

When fires occur in these overloaded landscapes, they typically burn more intensely and move through tree canopies rather than remaining closer to the ground. Firefighting is still necessary, but emergency response alone does not remove accumulated fuel or restore the conditions that can make future fires less destructive. And as the fires get larger and more intense in response to both overcrowding and rising temperatures, current firefighting techniques are often inadequate.

Responsible Forest Restoration Is Not the Same as Logging

More active forest management is often proposed as part of wildfire prevention, but the term covers very different practices. Removing trees does not automatically improve a forest, and poorly planned logging can damage soil, water systems, wildlife habitat, and long-term resilience. Fortunately, in California, forest health has been well studied, and effective ecologically informed forest restoration is widely practiced.

Harrison argues that restoration should aim to rebuild a healthier, more varied landscape. That involves selectively reducing excessive tree density, creating a mixture of forest and open areas, maintaining trees of different ages, improving soil conditions, and eventually allowing lower-intensity fire to return safely.

In some cases, environmentally effective restoration may require removing both larger and smaller trees. The objective is not to maximize timber extraction but to reach and maintain an ecologically appropriate forest structure.

That also creates a business challenge. An initial restoration treatment may produce a large volume of wood, while later maintenance treatments yield much less. Processing facilities and local businesses therefore need models that can accommodate declining material volumes over time rather than assuming continuous growth.

Forest Restoration Needs Useful Markets for Removed Wood

Removing excess material from forests is expensive. Trees and woody biomass are heavy, treatment areas may be far from roads, and many regions lack nearby processing capacity.

Leaving material in piles can reduce tree density but may create another fire risk. Burning it releases much of the stored carbon back into the atmosphere. Harrison discussed alternatives such as returning material to the soil through a range of processing, from composting and mulch production to using pyrolysis to produce heat, energy, chemical products, and soil amendments. Portable systems can also reduce transportation requirements by bringing processing closer to the source.

He sees construction materials as one of the most promising long-term uses. Responsibly sourced wood can remain stored in buildings for decades while also supporting demand for housing, manufacturing, and local employment.

In California, however, that opportunity is limited by a lack of local processing capacity and the construction industry’s preference for wood imported from other regions. Expanding the regional market would require more mills, manufacturing capacity, skilled workers, and stronger demand from builders and procurement teams.

Mass Timber Can Reduce Carbon, but Sourcing Matters

Mass timber products combine traditional timber, veneers, strands, or smaller pieces of wood into engineered structural components. This allows manufacturers to use material that may not be suitable for conventional timber construction and to produce prefabricated building elements off-site.

Harrison sees mass timber as a potential alternative to more carbon-intensive structural materials such as conventional concrete and steel. It can also keep carbon stored in buildings for long periods. But the climate case depends heavily on where the wood comes from and how the forest is managed. Renewable does not automatically mean sustainable.

Companies considering mass timber should examine the source of the wood, harvesting practices, traceability, transportation, processing requirements, expected building life, and what happens to the material at the end of that life. Most US Federal Forest lands are currently managed to meet long-term sustainable patterns. State and private forestlands are more variable. Certification can help, although Harrison noted that formal certification may be costly for smaller landowners and suppliers.

Traceability through sawmills and manufacturers can provide another layer of assurance. Procurement teams should ask suppliers to document the origin of the material, the management practices used, and the chain of custody through production.

Prefabrication Could Make Mass Timber More Practical

One advantage of mass timber is that components can be designed and manufactured before they reach the construction site. Once the foundation and other preparations are complete, prefabricated structural elements can be assembled more quickly than many conventional systems.

Harrison believes wider adoption will depend on moving beyond custom-designed showcase projects toward more standardized products. In practical terms, the industry needs repeatable components that can be manufactured efficiently and used across many projects rather than redesigning each building from scratch.

That shift would still require clear building codes, trained designers, manufacturing capacity, and reliable supplies of responsibly sourced wood.

Cities Can Be Retrofitted to Function More Like Natural Systems

Harrison applies the same systems approach to cities through his work with Leaf Island, a green infrastructure company focused on the design and fabrication of scalable green infrastructure products that replicate resilient processes found in Nature to improve urban life.

Modern urban areas consume large amounts of resources, generate waste, and rely heavily on hard surfaces such as roofs, roads, parking lots, and sidewalks. Those surfaces absorb heat and prevent water from entering the soil.

Nature works differently. Water, vegetation, soil, and organic material remain part of continuous cycles, and outputs from one process become inputs for another.

Applying that logic to cities does not require rebuilding them from the ground up. It means retrofitting existing buildings and infrastructure, so they manage heat, water, vegetation, and waste more effectively.

Examples include green roofs, planted walls, trees, bioswales, permeable surfaces, constructed wetlands, community gardens, rooftop agriculture, improved stormwater storage, and recycled materials used in growing media or construction.

One Green Infrastructure Project Can Deliver Multiple Benefits

Vegetation can address several urban problems at once. Through shade and evapotranspiration, plants can reduce local temperatures. Green roofs can also improve insulation and reduce some heating and cooling demand.

Plants and soil can capture rainfall, limiting the amount of water entering drainage and sewer systems during storms. This is particularly important in cities with combined sewer systems, where heavy rainfall can lead to stormwater and untreated sewage overflowing into rivers and other waterways.

Vegetation can also trap the highly toxic sub-2.5-micron airborne particles that are a primary trigger for many respiratory illnesses, support biodiversity, and improve public spaces. The business challenge is that these benefits often go to different parties. A building owner may save on energy, while a city benefits from lower stormwater pressure and residents benefit from cooler streets and cleaner air.

That split creates a financing problem. The organization paying for the project may receive only part of its total value.

Green Infrastructure Still Needs Clear Performance Metrics

Building owners and investors usually want to know how long a project will take to pay for itself. Harrison said an unsubsidized green roof can have a financial payback period of roughly 10 to 12 years, although the actual result depends on the building, climate, design, incentives, energy prices, and maintenance.

Some organizations may accept that timeframe because they value broader environmental and social benefits. Others will only consider projects with much shorter returns.

The larger problem is that benefits such as public cooling, health improvements, biodiversity, and reduced pressure on drainage systems are rarely measured within the same financial framework.

Performance should therefore be defined before installation. Depending on the project, useful indicators can include changes in roof or street-level temperature, energy use, stormwater retention, peak runoff, plant survival, maintenance requirements, biodiversity, air quality, infrastructure life, and avoided costs.

Vegetation also needs time to establish. Harrison said measurable effects may begin to appear within several months, depending on the growing season and plant mix. After that, maintenance remains part of the project. Native or locally adapted plants can reduce upkeep, but they do not eliminate it.

Permitting Can Be a Bigger Barrier Than Technology

For many green infrastructure and mass timber projects, the main obstacle is not the technology itself. Harrison pointed to permitting as a major barrier in the United States. Rules vary across states and local authorities, creating a fragmented system for developers, contractors, manufacturers, and building owners.

He cited New York City’s Department of Environmental Protection's Green Infrastructure Grant Program’s green roof subsidy as an example. Although the program can cover a large share of project costs, the application and reimbursement process can take many months. As a result, relatively few projects have used the subsidy compared with the number of buildings that could potentially qualify.

This creates a contradiction. A city may want more green infrastructure because it reduces heat and stormwater pressure, while its own permitting and funding systems make those projects difficult to complete.

Organizations also need to account for approval timelines, coordination between owners and contractors, roof warranties, maintenance responsibilities, monitoring, and the difficulty of assigning financial value to public benefits.

Public and Private Investment Need to Be Better Aligned

Many of the benefits of green infrastructure extend beyond the property where the investment is made. A private owner may pay for a green roof, while the surrounding community benefits from cooler temperatures, stormwater retention, cleaner air, and better public space.

Harrison argues that expecting private owners to finance all of those public benefits creates a structural imbalance. Public support can help through grants, tax incentives, faster permitting, technical assistance, procurement commitments, clearer standards, or shared monitoring.

The design of that support matters. A generous program that is difficult to access may produce less impact than a smaller program with a simple process.

Where Organizations Can Start

Harrison recommends starting with measures that already fit within familiar planning and infrastructure processes. Cities and organizations can substantially increase tree and plant coverage, improve stormwater capture, build bioswales, convert underused land into small parks or gardens, and use rooftops for vegetation or food production.

New buildings offer more flexibility because these measures can be incorporated during design. Existing buildings are more complicated, particularly when structural limits, warranties, permitting, and maintenance need to be addressed.

Organizations should also look for combinations that improve overall system performance. Solar panels and green roofs actually complement each other; the cooling provided by plants increases the efficiency of the solar panels, and there are many species of shade-tolerant plants that can thrive underneath as well as beside a solar array.

Conclusion

The practical message from Harrison’s work is not that every organization should adopt the same solution. It is that climate adaptation works better when projects are evaluated in context.

Forest restoration needs responsible management, viable markets for removed wood, processing capacity, and long-term maintenance. Mass timber needs credible sourcing and traceability. Urban green infrastructure needs measurable performance, workable permitting, clear responsibility, and financing that reflects both private and public benefits.

For sustainability teams and business decision-makers, that means looking beyond whether a product or project can be labeled “green”. The more useful questions are how it fits into the wider system, who benefits, who pays, how performance will be measured, and whether the solution can be maintained over time.

About Josh Harrison and Related Projects

Josh Harrison is Director of the Center for the Study of the Force Majeure, an art and science research and development collaborative based at UC Santa Cruz. The Center builds on 50 years of work by ecological artists Newton and Helen Harrison and focuses on developing practical, systemic responses to complex environmental challenges.

Its work includes Living Forests, which explores forest restoration, wildfire resilience, water, biodiversity, and the economic use of material removed through responsible forest management. Harrison is also involved with Leaf Island, which focuses on green infrastructure and ways to help cities function more like natural ecosystems.

More of Josh Harrison’s written work is available on Medium.