WVFA Mountain State Forestry Summer 2020

I N D U S T R Y N E W S 6 West Virginia Forestry Association Mountain State Forestry | Summer 2020 www.wvfa.org Forest Carbon Markets 101 By Eric Kingsley, Innovative Natural Resource Solutions LLC THE PRIVATE FORESTS OF WEST VIRGINIA hold over 420 million tons of carbon in trees—equivalent to the annual CO2 emissions of about 24 million gas-powered vehicles (for perspective, there are about 585,000 cars in West Virginia). Forest landowners are starting to see opportunities to be rewarded—financially—for the important work their forests are doing to sequester and store carbon. Trees naturally take carbon out of the atmosphere—about half of the dry weight of a tree is carbon. As trees grow, they pull carbon out of the atmosphere and convert it to wood. Markets are emerging that pay landowners to increase or retain carbon in their forests, paid by companies that either must (compliance) or want to (voluntary) offset their carbon emissions. Since forest carbon markets started developing at the beginning of this century, forest landowners have been paid over $2.8 billion carbon uptake and store carbon. There are two major markets for forest carbon: a compliance market run through the California Air Resources Board, which requires commitments of 100 years, and the voluntary market, where landowners make commitments of 40 years. Both compliance and voluntary markets require a detailed inventory of the forest to determine how much carbon is present. This is then used to model future forest growth and estimate how many credits (and how much money) can be generated by the forest. The way most transactions are structured, forest landowners are able to continue to harvest the growth above and beyond the volume that was present when the initial inventory was conducted. For Above-Ground and Below-Ground Carbon in Live Trees Private Forests in West Virginia (tons) 430,00,000 420,00,000 410,00,000 400,00,000 390,00,000 380,00,000 370,00,000 2004–2008 2007–2011 2012–2018