Woodland Wisdom, Part 5: Carbon Credits and Forestland Owners

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- Hi, Sanford Smith here from Penn State Extension.

And Calvin Norman is also with me again.

And we're talking about carbon credits and carbon markets as they relate to forests today.

Now Calvin, this is kind of a new topic for me, but I know you know a lot about it, and that's why I wanted to talk to you.

So what is a carbon credit?

- So a carbon credit is when someone, a buyer, maybe a company or a person pays someone else, in this case we're talking about forests, so it would be a forest owner, to do some kind of behavior change.

That might be not harvesting timber for 20 years, or spraying invasive species, that increases carbon sequestered or captured out of the atmosphere by their forests.

So you're not getting paid for what the forest is doing naturally, but for a behavior change that increases carbon captured and stored, so it's out of the atmosphere, it's staying out of the atmosphere, by the forest.

- Okay, interesting.

So people have to change their behavior a little bit.

So what kind of people are we talking about?

- [Calvin] So in this case, we're talking about forest owners.

In Pennsylvania, we're talking mainly about private forest owners.

- [Sanford] All right and there are, there's a big group of those, about 800,000 of them in Pennsylvania.

So that's interesting.

So you pay them a little bit to, or a lot, I don't know how much it is, but to enhance the growth in their forest so it captures more carbon from the air, is that right? - That is it, exactly.

- [Sanford] Okay, so how do forest landowners get involved in this kind of stuff?

- Well, they can look it up.

There's lots of ways to find different programs out there.

But every carbon program is a little bit different from the next carbon program.

So some of them work on a 20-year contract, some of them work on a 4-year contract.

Some of them want you to harvest timber, some of them don't.

And some want you to spray invasive species.

So it's important that forest owners think about what's best for their forest and what's gonna help that forest grow the best and stay healthy and to work on programs based around that.

- Yeah, and when you say you spray invasive species, that's kind of confusing.

So you kill back the invasive so the trees can grow better.

Is that right? - That's exactly it.

- Okay, all right. - That's exactly it.

- Well, good.

Are we talking about big money here?

- Not quite, not quite.

You're looking at about 4 to $10 per acre, per year.

And it's not always paid up front.

Some of it, they'll pay you a little bit upfront, and then more as the years go on.

Some of it, they pay you that amount at the end of the year.

So it depends.

- Okay. Kind of interesting.

So forest landowners have an opportunity, don't they?

To make a little money, maybe help pay the taxes or something?

- Maybe, yeah.

- Okay, well thank you, Calvin, for joining me today and thank you folks for listening.

Hope you learned a little bit about carbon credits and carbon markets.