By Cecilia Larson/Community News Service
Editor’s note: The Community News Service is a program in which University of Vermont students work with professional editors to provide content for local news outlets at no cost.
Forged by the American Forest Foundation and the Nature Conservancy, a program that pays people to set aside forest to store carbon has been growing in Vermont over the last two years.
The Family Forest Carbon Program launched in 2020 in Pennsylvania, and after learning from the foresters, stakeholders and landowners down there, its organizers migrated north in the summer of 2022 seeking to benefit Vermont communities.
Since then, close to 500 landowners have expressed interest in enrolling in the program and being paid close to $300 an acre, dispersed over a 20-year period, for preserving the sequestered land. To join, a landowner must have at least 30 acres of naturally growing trees.
Programs like this have existed nationally for a while, but their focus often has been limited to large plots of land, thousands of acres at a time, and were expensive to operate, said University of Vermont professor and forest scientist Bill Keeton. The Family Forest Carbon Program sought to bring a solution to the small forest owner, someone who wants to play a part in reducing atmospheric carbon and also improve biodiversity by encouraging birds and critters to stick around.
In Vermont, some 80% of forestland is owned by small landowners, who in the past have had limited options for carbon storage programs, according to Jim Shallow, director of strategic conservation initiatives for the state branch of the Nature Conservancy, one of the country’s largest environmental nonprofits.
The program is linked to voluntary carbon markets, in which companies and other organizations can pay to offset their emissions by buying carbon credits. Each credit represents a certain amount of carbon emissions kept from the atmosphere. Those credits come from places like the forests in the Family Forest Carbon Program. The markets face relatively little regulation — though one federal agency has been looking to change that — and the credits have been criticized as scams vulnerable to fraud.
Supporters see the potential positive impact of these programs for combating climate change and preserving forests, natural guards against excess carbon.
About 97,000 acres of Vermont land are in the process of coming under the program, with 38 contracts fully signed so far covering close to 7,500 acres, Shallow said.
The program has faced challenges of high interest and low capacity, which its leaders are facing head on.
“It’s a good problem to have, in my opinion,” Shallow said.
Fred Pond, a UVM librarian and avid woodsman, enrolled his land early in the program. His property, 140 acres in Tunbridge purchased in 1999, had been harvested heavily and unsustainably, he said. After a period of healing, and with help from a state tax break to incentivize undeveloped forests, Pond said his land grew back into a flourishing ecosystem.
Since enrolling his property in the program, Pond said he’s cultivated healthy greenery on his land. With the money he makes from the program, he hopes to buy an electric tractor.
The success of the program is measured through monitoring plots on enrolled properties. Each year, program workers go out and measure the tree growth happening on a given property and compare it with trends on a similar but unenrolled property.
Many of the landowners enrolled in this program are passionate outdoorspeople, said Tim Stout, who has managed his family’s multigenerational farm for the last 47 years and has land in the program. He said his 175 acres of mostly woods is open to the public for anyone interested in exploring nature.
“I love to get kids and older adults, anyone regardless of age, out to enjoy the forest,” Stout said. “They’ve made, in my mind, great progress in improving the scientific integrity of the program,” he said.
Eli Enman of Huntington owns and operates the Sleepy Hollow Inn. He has 700 acres of forest in the program, with bike and ski paths throughout. The first payments have allowed him to help finance an electric snow groomer to tend to ski slopes during the season. “It really allowed us to kind of make an environmentally good decision,” Enman said.
Keeton, the UVM forest ecosystem scientist, said that while that programs like this one have courted controversy and been labeled inauthentic by skeptics claiming carbon credits from sequestration programs were not valid; and the programs put a bad look on all market-based solutions, the Family Forest Carbon Program is different in that it can back up its claims.
“In some ways, that program has kind of led the way and has kind of shown that this can work and has sort of moved the needle in showing that there can be real climate benefits,” said Keeton.
