Unlocking the Potential of Carbon Financing to Restore Old Growth Forest Characteristics
Restoring old-growth forests is an effective way to sequester carbon, support biodiversity, and maintain beautiful forestland for future generations. However, land managers striving to restore these essential landscapes face significant financial and logistical challenges. Carbon programs like LandYield can be a powerful tool to support these efforts, creating a mechanism to protect forests and offering financial and social incentives that enable land managers to undertake the complex and critical work of old-growth forest restoration.
What is an old-growth forest?
Old-growth forest, i.e. forests in the later stages of stand development, characterized by large trees, accumulation of dead woody material, and diverse stand structure, is a rare, but highly desirable forest type for many landowners.
Why is old-growth forest important?
These ecosystems support a greater diversity of plants and animals than second-growth forests because of a more varied forest structure along with snags and deadwood. This increased diversity helps make forests more resilient to disturbances like drought, heat, and other climate change impacts.
Old-Growth Forest Carbon Sequestration
Old-growth forests also store more carbon than younger forest types. While they sequester carbon more slowly because the total number of trees is lower, the overall volume of carbon they store is higher than second-growth forests, primarily due to carbon stored on the forest floor. Estimates show that old-growth forests store approximately twice as much carbon on the forest floor as second-growth forests.
Finally, old-growth forests are beautiful, resilient forests that can be passed down for future generations to manage and enjoy.
What’s the best way to manage land for old-growth characteristics?
In their publication on restoring old-growth characteristics, Tony D’Amato of the University of Vermont and Paul Catanzaro of UMass Amherst outline two strategies to restore old-growth characteristics.
Passive Forest Management
Approach 1 is a passive approach to old-growth forest management. This approach can take a century or more to fully restore old-growth characteristics depending on forest conditions. It requires good estate planning and long-term conservation. This approach results in the highest levels of carbon storage as deadwood is allowed to accumulate on the forest floor.
Active Forest Management Approach
Approach 2 is an active management approach that requires selective cutting and intentionally creating diverse habitats. This approach restores old-growth characteristics more quickly than a passive management approach, with the potential to have old-growth characteristics restored in fifty years. This method is highly dependent on individual site characteristics, but it generally involves creating canopy gaps for regeneration, thinning around and protecting designated legacy trees, and leaving deadwood and snags for habitat diversity.
How can LandYield help me restore old-growth characteristics in my forest?
LandYield can help landowners overcome a few challenges in restoring old-growth characteristics:
Generational Planning for Old-Growth Forest Restoration
The first challenge is ensuring that forests can be protected long enough to see the results of management activities. Whether passively or actively managed, restoring old-growth forest is a multi-generational planning effort. Enrolling land in a program like LandYield can ensure that old-growth management is feasible over the long term by providing quarterly payments over a 20- to 40-year term to ensure landowners are able to retain control of their land and have the autonomy to manage it according to their priorities.
Financing Management for Old-Growth Forest Restoration
The second challenge is financing management activities that restore old growth characteristics. While LandYield’s program isn’t compatible with a management strategy that takes large amounts of biomass off the land, less intensive restoration strategies are fully compatible and can be financed by LandYield payments. Under ACR’s Small, Non-industrial Private Forestlands methodology, small areas (the smaller of 2% of the total area or 5 acres) can be cleared to create canopy openings for regeneration or clearings for habitat. Non-commercial thinning under this threshold is also allowed, allowing landowners to promote legacy trees.
Payments from LandYield can finance these management activities directly and fund forester consultations to create customized management plans for a property, enabling landowners to promote old-growth characteristics. Carbon payments also reduce the need to remove trees for commercial sale and allow more deadwood and snags to develop on the property.
Restore and Protect Old-Growth Forests through LandYield's Carbon Credit Revenue Program
The LandYield carbon program offers an innovative way for land managers to restore old-growth forests while benefiting from a new revenue stream. By incentivizing carbon sequestration and supporting sustainable land management, the program helps turn the restoration of these critical ecosystems into a financially viable and ecologically beneficial endeavor. As land managers work to restore these ancient forests, the LandYield carbon program provides the financial resources, and the long-term security needed to make these efforts a lasting success.