The world’s largest producer of industrial wood pellets Enviva Holdings, LP (Enviva), and Finite Carbon, North America’s leading developer of forest carbon offsets, have announced they are teaming up to engage small forest landowners across the US Southeast to voluntarily participate in global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions reduction programs.
The partnership, leveraging Finite Carbon’s CORE Carbon online platform, will help address climate change while generating new annual income for small landowners based on forest stewardship and extended rotations of mature bottomland hardwood forests.
Enviva’s partnership with Finite Carbon will deliver on the promise of continued forest growth and carbon sequestration across the U.S. Southeast by creating an additional incentive for small forest landowners to protect their forests, especially sensitive, bottomland hardwoods. This partnership will move our mission of fighting climate change and displacing coal forward by opening new avenues for forest owners with less than 5 000 acres to generate income from the growing carbon-offset market by choosing not to harvest their timberlands right now, enabling them to be a critical participant in addressing the global climate crisis, said John Keppler, Chairman, and CEO of Enviva.
While CORE Carbon will be available to over 1.5 million family and non-industrial forest owners in the United States (US), this partnership will leverage Enviva’s focus on bottomland hardwood forests in the US Southeast.
CORE Carbon is a free, easy to use digital platform designed to incentivize sustainable land management decisions. Our partnership with Enviva will make it easier for small forest landowners to enroll in the voluntary carbon offset market, access a new source of revenue, and protect some of the South’s cherished forests, said Sean Carney, President of Finite Carbon.
Enable landowner access to global carbon offset programs
The partnership will significantly increase the availability of global carbon offset programs to privately held forestland by leveraging Enviva’s well-established landowner network along with Finite Carbon’s CORE Carbon Platform, which utilizes remote sensing technologies to dramatically reduce the costs and barriers to market entry for smaller forest landowners with as little as 40 acres (≈ 16.6 hectares – ha) of forestland.
The initial phase of CORE Carbon will focus on a deferred harvest methodology, co-authored with American Carbon Registry, focusing on high conservation value forests such as mature bottomland hardwood stands in the US Southeast.
Over the next decade, the program will seek to make sustainable forestry a more feasible proposition by opening the carbon offset market to over 1.5 million small forest landowners and generating US$1 billion in carbon offset revenue for participating landowners.
Through the partnership, Enviva and Finite Carbon will create real and measurable progress toward the protection of bottomland forest habitats, which are critically important to biodiversity and wildlife, water quality and flood control, and carbon storage in the region.
Bottomland hardwood forests reduce the risk and severity of flooding to downstream communities by providing areas to store floodwater. In addition, these habitats improve water quality by filtering and flushing nutrients, processing organic wastes, and reducing sediment before it reaches open water.
