Paying people to capture carbon in their land could be an important climate solution, if we could figure out how to quantify and enforce it.
getting money to “save” forests that nobody, especially not the birdwatchers, wanted to log. A European Union audit of the Clean Development Mechanism, a program to have polluters pay for offset projects in poorer countries, found that 85 percent of offset schemes had a “low likelihood” of actually resulting in less carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.
Matthew Hurteau, an associate professor at the University of New Mexico who studies climate change mitigation and adaptation in forests, agreed that carbon offsetting isn’t a lost cause. If projects are reviewed with a discerning eye — with different verifiers cycling through and conducting unannounced spot checks — the public can be confident that they are capturing a significant amount of carbon emissions.
Susan Benedict is an accountant whose family has kept a patch of woodland as an investment and vacation retreat in western Pennsylvania. Benedict said she’s happy with the small amount of money she received to keep her forest standing but said she wouldn’t have wanted to log it even if she didn’t get the payment. She loves walking through her old-growth forest and photographing animals is too much to give it up.
“All you have to do is put it on paper as an offset, you don’t need to pay anyone to change their behavior,” said Trexler, who helped design AES Corporation’s Guatemalan scheme. The Family Forest Carbon Project pointed us to Louise Hartman. Back in 1939, her grandfather bought a piece of the old Sober chestnut plantation in Pennsylvania — once the largest chestnut farm in the world, before a fungus wiped out American chestnut trees in the early 1900s. Hartman’s father was a pipefitter who followed his work all over the country, but whenever he was home he’d bring Louise and her two sisters down to the property, where he kept a small herd of Black Angus cattle.
“It’s such a wonderful program,” she said. “I talk about it so much I think people are crossing the street when they see me coming.”the carbon market like Trexler and Barbara Haya, a research fellow at the University of California, Berkeley, told Grist that offsets that clearly lead to behavior change — and actually cut as much greenhouse gases as they claim — are in the minority. “We have found it mind-bogglingly difficult to find high-quality offsets,” Haya said.
The Family Forest Carbon Program, the organization working with Louise Hartman and Susan Benedict, is piloting a new approach. The organization compares each participant’s forest against 10 other similar plots of land to see if their program is really helping the participant’s capture more carbon. Hartman’s forest will be weighed against other recently logged parcels, while Benedict’s forest will be compared against old-growth wilderness.
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