Carbon markets represent an exciting revenue opportunity for family landowners, while also helping to support local economies, protect wildlife, and conserve forests so that families can enjoy their benefits well into the future.
Despite family landowners managing roughly 39% of forestland in the US, the high cost of project development has traditionally left most family landowners unable to access the carbon market. This leaves a vast amount of important forestland vulnerable to subdivision and development.
To address this, LandYield draws upon the innovative CORE Carbon™ platform, developed by Finite Carbon, to work with family landowners who own between 40 – 5,000 acres to enroll their land in a carbon project. The program is designed to be flexible and allow landowners to continue earning money from non-timber forest products, hunting leases, and recreation in addition to this new carbon revenue stream.
I had a chance to catch up with Jordan Golinkoff, Sr. Director, Research & Development at Finite Carbon, to talk about the technology that underpins the CORE Carbon platform and how it has opened the door for smaller landowners to participate in the carbon market.
Josh Fain: Could you start by explaining to people what CORE Carbon is and how it facilitates smaller, family landowners entering the carbon market?
Jordan Golinkoff: CORE Carbon is a groundbreaking platform that leverages cutting-edge, award-winning technology to streamline the development of carbon offset projects for landowners. As you noted, traditionally, carbon projects were only feasible for large tracts of land due to cost constraints. This excluded smaller, non-industrial landowners.
CORE Carbon has changed that by using advanced satellite imagery, remote sensing, and machine learning to estimate carbon storage potential in real-time. This innovation significantly reduces the costs and complexities associated with carbon offset projects, which in turn enables landowners with properties between 40 and 5,000 acres to enter the carbon market.
JF: What are the specific technological advancements that CORE Carbon utilizes to measure a forest’s attributes as accurately as a ground inventory?
JG: One of the biggest challenges in forest carbon offsetting has been the reliance on costly fieldwork and measurements. CORE Carbon addresses this burden by leveraging the power of the U.S. Forest Service’s (USFS’) extensive forest measurement system and pairing it with remote sensing technologies, integrating satellite imagery and LiDAR data. This approach provides us with detailed, high-resolution views of forests, allowing for accurate assessments. These estimates, combined with extensive analysis by our team of forestry experts and validated by an independent third-party verifier, allow us to predict forest biomass and carbon storage from a distance.
Additionally, we leverage AI and forest growth models for change management detection in forest conditions over time. This ensures that we’re able to track carbon sequestration and ensure the integrity of any claimed offsets for smaller tracts of forestland by rigorously screening for reversals due to forest disturbances. The beauty of the integration of these technologies is that they enhance accuracy while significantly reducing costs, making carbon offset projects more accessible for smaller-scale landowners.
JF: Can you explain more about how the process of remote monitoring, reporting, and verification ensures that any disturbance that would cause a loss of carbon is detected?
JG: Integrity is paramount in carbon markets, and CORE Carbon is designed with this in mind. The projects meet rigorous verification standards through continuous forest monitoring and data updates. Our real-time monitoring paired with quarterly reviews and annual updates gives us the ability to detect disturbances like deforestation from harvesting or fire. This ensures that carbon credits accurately reflect true carbon sequestration. Furthermore, the combination of AI and forest biometrics allows us to accurately estimate the additionality of projects, which means evaluating how the forest would be managed without the carbon project.
All of this together means that these projects produce high-integrity credits which generate significant value for landowners and are trusted by buyers.
JF: You mentioned these projects produce high- integrity credits. Can you talk about the standard CORE Carbon uses to develop projects?
JG: The land enrolled through CORE Carbon for offset projects is developed and verified using ACR’s peer-reviewed Improved Forest Management on Small Non-Industrial Private Forestlands (SNIPFL) methodology, which was designed specifically for family forests.
The SNIPFL methodology allows for efficient and detailed quantification and sets rigorous standards for monitoring and verifying greenhouse gas emission reductions and removals generated by the landowners enrolled. ACR then issues offset credits once the projects have been verified by an accredited third-party auditor. We believe that the increased reliance on remote sensing and modeling technology not only enables these projects but also leads to more robust offsets due to the many checks and balances built into this program.
JF: Where do you see the technology headed in the future?
JG: We’re continuing to develop data tools and products that will allow us to provide insights with greater speed, accuracy, and precision that in turn allow Finite’s internal teams to work more efficiently.
As project development best practices continue to evolve, we’re committed to leveraging advances in machine learning and remote sensing to provide robust and accurate estimates that result in high-quality offsets while evaluating new ways to apply our expertise to an even broader set of forest carbon projects. We are also very excited to expand the program by rolling it out in the Lake States next year.
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LandYield is excited to leverage CORE Carbon to provide smaller landowners in 26 states across the Northeast and Southeast U.S. the opportunity to access carbon markets.
These regions contain vast amounts of privately owned forests that are crucial carbon sinks. By enabling more landowners to participate, we’re unlocking significant untapped carbon potential.
Landowners with 40 – 5,000 acres can now turn their forests into financial assets while contributing to conservation efforts. This opens up real financial opportunities for these landowners while ensuring that the projects contribute meaningfully to climate mitigation.