Increasing integrity and access for family forest owners in the U.S.

Conservation Need

 

Family forest owners (owning properties between 30 - 2,000 acres) have been largely excluded from carbon markets due to the complexity and high upfront costs of participation. Yet combined, they own more than 250 million acres of forest land in the United States, or 2 out of every 5 forested acres. 

Without access to funds from the carbon market, family forest owners have managed their forest holdings primarily to maximize timber values, harvesting trees immediately at maturity and foregoing investments in forest management practices that also take forest health, wildlife habitat, and carbon sequestration into account.

 

Carbon Opportunity

 

Recognizing the complexity and high costs of carbon projects to these landowners, The American Forest Foundation (AFF) and The Nature Conservancy (TNC) developed the Family Forest Carbon Program that pays small forest holders to implement climate-smart forestry practices that increase carbon storage and improve forest health and wildlife habitat. 

TerraCarbon Solution

 

TerraCarbon partnered with AFF and TNC to develop a new improved forest management methodology to measure the benefits from these improved practices.  The methodology uses an innovative and high-integrity approach to dynamically measure changes in carbon stocks in participating lands against a benchmark composed of similar properties that are using conventional practices.

The methodology will be used to register the Family Forest Carbon Program as a grouped carbon project with the Verified Carbon Standard (VCS) so that carbon project costs are spread over a larger area of participating forests. Carbon offset revenues will help fund program payments to participating landowners.

Conservation Results

 

The Family Forest Carbon Program has been initially rolled out to family forest owners in the Central Appalachian states of West Virginia, Pennsylvania, and select counties in Maryland. 

TerraCarbon is developing the documentation to register the project and preparing the first monitoring report for the first cohort of properties that were enrolled by AFF.

Read a related article on the Family Forest Carbon Program.

 

Services | Methodology, Design, & Monitoring