{"id":10106,"date":"2024-01-29T14:31:06","date_gmt":"2024-01-29T14:31:06","guid":{"rendered":""},"modified":"-0001-11-30T00:00:00","modified_gmt":"-0001-11-30T00:00:00","slug":"forestry-carbon-NH-Maine-53798898\/","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/nne-concord-monitor-2.newspackstaging.com\/?p=10106","title":{"rendered":"Granite Geek: Managing forests for carbon is, sorry to say, a financial problem"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
\"A<\/a>
A portion of the Scammon Ridge Headwaters Project near Moosehead Lake in Maine, purchased under the new Exemplary Forestry Investment Fund, aiming to develop systems for large-scale private and government investment in using forests for climate mitigation.<\/figcaption><\/figure>

Whenever I read an online discussion about building devices to remove carbon from the air, somebody will always pop up to comment, \u201cThat technology already exists \u2013 they\u2019re called trees!\u201d and then high-five themselves for being clever.<\/p>\n

They never stick around for the telling response: \u201cThat approach has a fatal flaw \u2013 it\u2019s called money!\u201d <\/p>\n

Investors can be persuaded to spend big bucks on cool new devices that take carbon from the air and turn it into something like bricks because that is quantifiable. It\u2019s much harder to get them to spend on growing trees, let alone not mowing them down in the first place.<\/p>\n

Such biogenic carbon removal, to give it the fancy term, faces problems from uncertain science to sloppy record-keeping to outright fraud, and even when done well, doesn\u2019t create the monetary rate of return of traditional investments. (The environmental rate of return is a different matter, but institutional investors don\u2019t care.) These issues make it difficult to create a system that will pay landowners to manage their forests in ways that increase carbon storage rather than ways that only increase payments from development or standard logging.<\/p>\n

Enter the Exemplary Forestry Investment Fund, a Maine-based initiative of several environmental groups.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe need to convince private equity that a return of about 4% to do a really good thing for climate in the northern forest of New England is what you want to do,\u201d said Robert Perschel, executive director at the New England Forestry Foundation (NEFF), one of the fund\u2019s partners. \u201cThat\u2019s now our challenge: to prove we have a viable working tool that local communities love, capable of delivering a reasonable rate of return.\u201d <\/p>\n

The fund, which includes the Maine Mountain Collaborate and an environmental-focused financial firm called Quantified Ventures, has started by taking a standard route: Buying forest land that was being eyed for development. They have purchased 3,000 acres next to Moosehead Lake, Maine\u2019s answer to Lake Winnipesaukee, and will be managing it under a system NEFF calls Exemplary Forestry.<\/p>\n

This system isn\u2019t exactly modest in its goals \u2013 \u201ccarbon storage, long-term forest health, wildlife habitat, and sustainable timber value and production in partnership with local communities\u201d \u2013 but after all, forest land has the potential to do all of those things even when we use big machines to cut down and remove some of the trees.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe forestry we have been practicing is the kind of forestry where carbon stocks were accumulating \u2026 while we continued to harvest. We have data that can show how it works,\u201d said Perschel. One of the goals of the fund is \u201cto codify practices we\u2019ve been using\u201d so investors will be confident enough to support future projects. The fund\u2019s goal is to manage 10,000 acres in Maine and perhaps New Hampshire.<\/p>\n

At this point, I\u2019d like to anticipate what some of you are thinking: Why manage the forest? Just leave it alone \u2013 that\u2019s the best way to make it thrive! <\/p>\n

Alas, it\u2019s too late to leave forests alone. We\u2019re already messing with them via climate change, altered soil pH, invasive species (seen any ash trees lately?), air pollution and other factors. We have no choice but to try and manage our forests intelligently since we\u2019re accidentally managing them in destructive ways.<\/p>\n

Perschel put it like this: \u201cIf you throw seeds in a field and go away for two months, what you\u2019re going to get is some plants. If you tend it, garden it, weed it, water it, then you get a crop.\u201d Whether the crop is more timber for housing, healthier trees to store carbon, places for wildlife, support for water supplies or all of those things depends on how you approach it.<\/p>\n

Which brings us back to money.<\/p>\n

The purchase of what\u2019s known as the Scammon Ridge Headwaters was made possible by the sale of a conservation easement to the Forest Society of Maine and Friends of Wilson Ponds Area. That\u2019s a common sort of arrangement for buying parcels but isn\u2019t easily scaleable, as investors like to say. The goal of this purchase is to establish a program that will attract money from private investors and government sources that realize we need to use every tool to reduce the impact of climate change.<\/p>\n

\u201cLong-term, we think we can prove our point that this delivers important climate mitigation outcomes and we\u2019ll get more funding,\u201d said Perschel. \u201cWe hope this is a tool that we can use around New England. \u2026 We\u2019ve got the background done already, don\u2019t have to spend time on that. We\u2019d like to see it adopted in other regions, maybe around the world.\u201d<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Whenever I read an online discussion about building devices to remove carbon from the air, somebody will always pop up to comment, \u201cThat technology already exists \u2013 they\u2019re called trees!\u201d and then high-five themselves for being clever.They never stick…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":142,"featured_media":10107,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"newspack_ads_suppress_ads":false,"newspack_popups_has_disabled_popups":false,"newspack_sponsor_sponsorship_scope":"","newspack_sponsor_native_byline_display":"inherit","newspack_sponsor_native_category_display":"inherit","newspack_sponsor_underwriter_style":"inherit","newspack_sponsor_underwriter_placement":"inherit","_newspack_byline_active":true,"_newspack_byline":"by [Author id=142]David Brooks[\/Author] Monitor staff","newspack_content_restriction_is_exempt":false,"newspack_featured_image_position":"","newspack_post_subtitle":"","newspack_article_summary_title":"Overview:","newspack_article_summary":"","newspack_hide_updated_date":false,"newspack_show_updated_date":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[504,8],"tags":[24,14,505,15],"newspack_spnsrs_tax":[],"coauthors":[507],"class_list":["post-10106","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-home-centerpiece-2-cm","category-news","tag-facebook","tag-granite-geek","tag-paywall","tag-science-technology","entry"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/nne-concord-monitor-2.newspackstaging.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/01\/42800736-1.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/nne-concord-monitor-2.newspackstaging.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10106","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/nne-concord-monitor-2.newspackstaging.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/nne-concord-monitor-2.newspackstaging.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nne-concord-monitor-2.newspackstaging.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/142"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nne-concord-monitor-2.newspackstaging.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=10106"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/nne-concord-monitor-2.newspackstaging.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10106\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10108,"href":"https:\/\/nne-concord-monitor-2.newspackstaging.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10106\/revisions\/10108"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nne-concord-monitor-2.newspackstaging.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/10107"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/nne-concord-monitor-2.newspackstaging.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=10106"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nne-concord-monitor-2.newspackstaging.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=10106"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nne-concord-monitor-2.newspackstaging.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=10106"},{"taxonomy":"newspack_spnsrs_tax","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nne-concord-monitor-2.newspackstaging.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fnewspack_spnsrs_tax&post=10106"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nne-concord-monitor-2.newspackstaging.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcoauthors&post=10106"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}