Ask Michael Dawson about entering the carbon market and whether he would go back and do it again, and his answer is simple: “In a skinny minute.”
The process itself, however, is more complex.
South Carolina’s Francis Beidler Forest — the world’s
largest virgin cypress-tupelo swamp forest — sold roughly 450,000 carbon
credits for no less than $8 per credit in California’s carbon market in 2014,
and a recent Clemson Extension workshop helped South Carolina landowners learn
more about the carbon market and how they can create a new revenue stream and
help combat climate change.
“We had a wonderful experience with this,” said Dawson,
retired center director of the Audubon Center and Sanctuary at Francis Beidler
Forest. “It is a commitment, it’s a big project and you have to be serious
about it, but our net result was wonderful and, if your land will warrant it, I
recommend it wholeheartedly.”
As part of the Carbon Market for South Carolina project,
funded by the Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS), the Clemson
workshop focused on educating the state’s forest landowners about the amount of
carbon sequestered through various forest management activities and how they
can be sellers of carbon credits from their forest areas.
“Our goal was to investigate information about the
California carbon market for landowners in the state of South Carolina and also
training graduate students to be future professionals in this market,” said
Marzieh Motallebi, an assistant professor at Clemson University’s Belle W.
Baruch Institute of Coastal Ecology and Forest Science. “Improving forest
management practices can improve wildlife health, improve soil quality and
water quality and enhance biodiversity.”
Forests act as carbon sinks and play an important role in
combating climate change and its impacts caused by human activities. Greenhouse
gas emissions anywhere affect the global environment and people everywhere,
leading to a push for international cooperation in combating climate change.
Some notable market-based programs to reduce greenhouse gas
emissions include the European Union’s Emissions Trading System, the Northeast
Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative and the Midwestern Regional Greenhouse Gas
Reduction Accord.
But the Extension workshop was focused on California’s
Cap-and-Trade Program (CA-CTP), the second-largest carbon market in the world
with the aim of reducing California’s GHG emissions to 1990 levels by 2020. The
California carbon market also has the highest carbon price in the world.
Sarah Wescott, forest program manager of the Climate Action
Reserve in California, discussed how California’s program is pioneering a
unique way to reduce the impact of climate change by helping forest owners
around the U.S. change the way they manage their land and offering a credit for
each extra ton of carbon dioxide their trees sequester.
People and companies in California that are required by the
state to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions can purchase the credits, each
of which are worth about $10. Since 2013, about 3 million tons of forest
offsets have been purchased and used by California emitters each year — the
equivalent to taking every passenger vehicle in the state off the road for a
week.
“Offsets are a useful tool to provide different industries
that are not regulated to reduce their emissions,” Wescott said. “And so once
they generate those credits, those sellers will transact the credits with
buyers that are wanting to reduce their emissions voluntarily or required to
reduce their emissions by some sort of state law or cap-and-trade program.”
Wescott said the credits are issued through an ongoing
monitoring, reporting and verification program under which landowners monitor
their forests, calculate the actual carbon reductions and verify it through a
third party.
“In order to ensure the quality of offsets, we have several
standards that our protocols all have to meet,” she said. “We want to make sure
that the reductions are real. That makes sure that they are quantified in a
conservative, accurate manner. We also have to make sure that they are
additional. That means that we’re not giving credit for something that would
have taken place anyway. We also require that the reductions be permanent,
which we define as 100 years.”
Lucas Clay, a master’s student in Clemson’s department of
forestry and environmental conservation, discussed the potential for South
Carolina forests to contribute to the California carbon market.
Clay said a significant number of South Carolina’s counties
were comprised of more than 50 to 60 percent of forested lands, and the state’s
total forested acres are just more than 13 million, or about 65 percent of its
land.
Private owners hold 88 percent of the state’s forestlands —
or about 11.3 million acres — and forestry contributes $17.5 billion annually
to South Carolina income and provides support for almost 45,000 families.
“That’s the first indicator of the fact that South Carolina
is a good place for the carbon market,” Clay said. “Forestry and timber
production are extremely important to South Carolina. But at the same time,
only 20 percent of the forest landowners are commercially harvesting tracts for
production. So that leaves 80 percent of the 88 percent of private forested
lands that are potentially not used for large-scale timber production.”
And that 80 percent of land that is not in timber production
could potentially generate carbon market revenue.
Hunter Parks owns a farm in North Carolina, Mattamuskeet
Ventures, that became the site of the first Avoided Conversion Carbon Offset
Forestry project in the U.S., permanently dedicating a percentage of his land
to continuous forest cover and generating carbon credits for doing so.
Parks, who is also founder and chairman of Green Assets
Inc., a leading forest offset developer, said it is important for landowners to
consider their intentions and future plans for their property before using it
to enter the carbon market.
“I tell a client that their property is not fitted for this
project a lot more than I say the opposite, that they are,” he said. “As a
landowner, the worst thing I can do is get a landowner involved in this project
that it doesn’t fit or won’t fit down the road. … There’s a lot of discussion
around who does this and who pays this and how much does it cost. In this day
and age, you absolutely need to hire a carbon offset developer to do one of
these projects.”
Dawson echoed Parks’ sentiment that it was essential to hire
a project developer in undertaking a carbon offset project.
“It is a very complicated process … and you want to be
comfortable with whatever project developer you commit to,” he said. “And in
our case, (the company that serves as) our forestry managers are involved in a
lot of the inventory and that sort of stuff, and we wanted to be sure that they
were up to speed and comfortable with the project. So, those are the sorts of
considerations that we needed as an organization to be comfortable with before
embarking on the project in the first place.”