Third-party verifiers examine only whether a project follows the methodology’s rules, not whether it’s at all plausible that, say, a sanctuary would harvest 89% of its trees in five years.Black Rock Forest (the United States) Show map of the United StatesĤ1☂4′29″N 74☀1′18″W / 41.40806°N 74.02167°W / 41.40806 -74.02167īlack Rock Forest is a 3,870-acre (15.7 km 2) forest and biological field station maintained by Black Rock Forest Consortium. Forestlands.” The rules do very little to ferret out nonfederal owners who might already be managing their lands sustainably for different reasons. It’s called “Improved Forest Management Methodology for Quantifying GHG Removals and Emission Reductions Through Increased Forest Carbon Sequestration on Non-Federal U.S. For its projects, the Conservancy most often uses an ACR methodology filled with formulas explaining how carbon should be measured and counted. ACR is operated by Winrock International, a nonprofit in Little Rock that touts market-based solutions to environmental problems. The Conservancy sets up many of its projects on the ACR, which, created in 1996, is the oldest of the major registries.

“Our timber projects are always geared toward forest health.”īut there are gaping loopholes that can let in programs that clearly don’t represent real emissions reductions. “Probably not,” says Stephen Repasch, executive director of the Bethlehem Authority, which oversees the watershed lands. City officials in Albany and Bethlehem both say it’s unlikely the municipalities would have done something so drastic. About two-thirds of Bethlehem’s trees and almost 90% of Albany’s trees would have been harvested within a decade, according to the project documents. Albany’s forest plans show the watershed has not experienced any harvesting for “nearly two decades.” But the offset projects say that were it not for the carbon revenue, massive deforesting would have commenced. In the two decades before Bethlehem signed its contract, each year it harvested about 70 acres, or 0.4% of its watershed land, according to the carbon-offset project documents. Most local governments protect the trees around reservoirs to guard their water quality it was highly unlikely these cities would aggressively cut down trees. “They weren’t going to overestimate what would have happened.” “We acquired the property to use it for sustainable forestry, so we couldn’t say it was going to be clear-cut,” says John Roe, who worked as a manager for both the Vermont Land Trust and the Nature Conservancy in the state. When the local chapter asked the Conservancy’s headquarters for its blessing to develop an offset project to generate income from the carbon it was saving, it was rebuffed, because it couldn’t say the offset payments triggered the carbon-saving practices. The nonprofits sought to practice sustainable harvesting on the land while preserving the habitat for biodiversity. During the late 2000s, leaders of the Conservancy’s Vermont chapter wanted to set up a carbon project on 26,000 acres of forested land just south of the Canadian border it had acquired along with the Vermont Land Trust in 1997, with most of the funding from a local philanthropist’s $5 million contribution. In the beginning the nonprofit was strict about carbon accounting, making it clear it wouldn’t be an enabler for credits that weren’t actually creating emissions reductions.

Blackrock forest