Plus: How institutions in the park are interacting with the billion-dollar industry
By Chloe Bennett
Hundreds of thousands of wooded acres in the Adirondacks are part of the booming carbon credit market and drawing international investors.
As companies look to neutralize their pollution and New York aims to offset its emissions, private North Country trees prove valuable to traders and buyers of carbon credits.
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The Adirondack Park’s massive forest carbon sink has absorbed pollution for ages. Now, parts of the woodlands are important players in a global enterprise: Trees continue storing unwanted greenhouse gases but are leveraged by polluting companies paying for the forests’ conservation.
The practice gained popularity in recent years as a temporary solution to the excess amount of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases heating the planet. Landowners, often timber companies in the park’s case, enroll their acreage in an offset program that aims to help forests store more carbon than they would without the project.
Carbon credits are derived from the calculation of additional carbon storage.
Some Adirondack-based projects produce credits sold on the compliance market, which is regulated by the California government. Other projects are voluntary and ungoverned by state or federal entities. Companies with sustainability or climate goals can buy credits voluntarily and advertise the investment to consumers.
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A transaction earlier this year of 92,200 acres scattered around the park suggests an increase in international interest in private North Country woods.
In February, a new timber investment management organization, Eastwood Forests, announced its first purchase was in the region. Powered by an international fund, the company took over stewardship of the Upper Hudson Woodlands, now named Northway, with plots in several Adirondack Park counties.
The Northway property has an existing offset agreement brokered by Finite Carbon, a powerful presence in North American carbon credit markets. As part of the land acquisition, Eastwood Forests will continue with the carbon offset program that’s already in place.
Carbon credits are produced by preserving a majority of the land and managing between 2,000 and 4,000 acres annually by harvesting trees or performing other types of forestry, a spokesperson for the company said.
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Eastwood Forests consists of foresters with experience in the park and partners from Tokyo-based Sumitomo Forestry. The company is headquartered in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.
By 2027, Eastwood Forests aims to manage about 320,000 acres of North American forests with help from $415 million raised from Japan-based investors, the partners announced. The Northway acreage and property in Virginia and West Virginia were the first two transactions.
Matt Sampson, vice president of forest management for Eastwood Forests, said familiarity with the Adirondacks’ environment and with the state Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC) were among the reasons behind the purchase.
“It was fortunate that the Northway property was among the first acquisition opportunities for Eastwood Forests,” he said. “Our team has decades of experience with the complexities of management in the Adirondack region.”
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About 83,000 acres are enrolled in the project, which was signed into a 100-year commitment under the California-based compliance market. The same forest is protected under a perpetual state conservation easement, with smaller tracts preserved by easements with the Open Space Institute and The Nature Conservancy.
Widespread investments in the park
A review of public documents shows the carbon market’s investment in the Adirondacks covers at least 428,000 acres, about 7% of the park, with significant holdings operating under the park’s largest landowner as of 2014, The Molpus Woodlands Group. Other entities involved in the park’s carbon programs include The Forestland Group, Park Forestry, The Northeast Wilderness Trust and Bluesource.
The trees that make up the land can sequester carbon dioxide for centuries and continue some of the storage as wood products. Scientists and foresters have long understood the science, but some now question the practices of outside entities profiting from the natural climate solution.
Corporations including Disney, Microsoft and airlines take credit for conserving forests by investing in the global carbon offset market, valued at $948 billion in 2023, according to the London Stock Exchange Group.
By adding the trees to their portfolios, companies claim to counteract pollution from their flights, buildings and other operations through carbon storage. Terms like “carbon neutral” and “net zero” are used by companies and governments to describe the trade, as forest carbon offset projects aim to balance out emissions, not eliminate them.
Eastwood Forests and Sumitomo Forestry set a goal to store an additional 1 million tons of carbon in North American forests each year by practicing sustainable forestry, which includes habitat conservation and some timber harvesting. The amount is equivalent to what comes out of more than 200,000 gas-powered cars driven for a year.
The motivation behind investing in the Adirondacks was to diversify investor portfolios, Sampson said.
Offset developer Finite Carbon, which is now owned by oil and gas giant BP, is behind most of the publicly available deals in the park and sells carbon credits to companies looking to neutralize their pollution.
Finite now has 60 offset projects in American forests, including at least five in the 6-million-acre Adirondack Park, totaling more than 370,000 acres.
Walking away from the market
Four years ago, The Nature Conservancy and Paul Smith’s College administrators explored the potential for the school to generate carbon credits from some of its 14,000-acre forest. The deal may have supported the Adirondacks’ only four-year college financially during a time of turnover and a significant deficit shown in tax documents. Profit from carbon projects varies widely by land and program, though landowners can receive thousands of dollars a year.
But the college walked away from the opportunity. In 2021, a new head forester for the college questioned the effectiveness of a carbon offset project on campus and the school was concerned about losing flexibility with forest management.
A commitment to reducing greenhouse gas emissions through its operations and forestry did not align with the project, said John Foppert, professor and head forester for the college.
To Foppert, selling carbon credits would be inconsistent with the college’s environmental standards. “I gave voice to my concerns that this would be taking some of the work that our forests do to make the world a better place and importing a bunch of emissions that belonged to other companies elsewhere in the economy, but that were going into the same global atmosphere that we all live under,” he said.
Foppert is among many foresters and scientists questioning the effectiveness of carbon offset programs and markets. Studies including a 2021 collaboration with universities in California and nonprofit CarbonPlan showed 29% of compliance projects overestimated carbon storage benefits. The scale of the error was “enormous,” CarbonPlan wrote, totaling $410 million in excess credits.
A recent analysis from offset rating agency Renoster and CarbonPlan showed three Finite Carbon projects in the U.S. had little or no climate benefits. Around 79% of credits should not have been issued, a report commissioned by The Guardian showed. None of the projects were based in the Adirondacks.
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Restoring the state’s carbon sink
Although the DEC is notified of carbon projects entangled in easements, it does not track the investors’ dealings since the markets are unregulated by the state.
Yet, New York has ambitious climate plans that include offsetting pollution through its forests. The state Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act of 2019 calls for cutting 15% of greenhouse gas emissions through offsets, supplementing a goal of reducing emissions by 85% of 1990 levels.
The DEC in recent years has published carbon offset resources for landowners and this spring joined a presentation alongside an organization directly involved in offset deals.
In May, representatives from the SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry (ESF), The Nature Conservancy and the DEC presented their respective work on carbon storage in the state at the Adirondack Research Consortium in Lake Placid.
Molly Hassett, a DEC forester with the division of lands and forests, said the department is focused on getting climate mitigation strategies in place like sustainable forest management and maximizing carbon storage. Using a new tool from ESF that can track land use change, Hassett said the state could identify where deforestation and carbon loss are happening.
New York’s forest carbon sink is shrinking, said Colin Beier, associate professor at ESF and lead on the carbon tool. “It has been weakening largely (due) to deforestation. Not a problem here in the Adirondack Park, but a problem elsewhere in the state,” he said.
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One solution for conserving small plots of land is with carbon offset deals, according to The Nature Conservancy.
“The Nature Conservancy has spent a lot of time in the last couple of years working on global standards to be able to provide the benefits from the carbon market,” said Michelle Brown, the conservancy’s senior conservation scientist in New York, during the consortium event. “We need to make sure we’re doing good projects.”
Recognizing flaws in its own projects, the organization developed a different carbon accounting approach, said Kevin Maddaford, director of U.S. and Canada carbon markets for TNC. Projects are given a more conservative baseline to avoid exaggerating the amount of carbon stored. An internal review process was also expanded, he said.
Brown said climate mitigation is a primary focus of the decades-old conservation organization. Shifting focus away from the complexities of carbon markets and offset programs, she said the practice is just one part of the Adirondacks’ suite of natural climate strategies. The broad benefits of North Country forests are what draw her in as a scientist, she said.
“These lands, particularly, these forest lands have recreational values, aesthetic values, clean air, clean water, wood products, wildlife, connectivity,” she said. “Truly, that co-benefit space is definitely the spark for me.”
Photo at top: Paul Smith’s College’s forest has been eyed for a carbon project. Photo by Brendan Wiltse
Carbon offsets seem to be a scam that allows wealthy firms with large carbon footprints get out of actually reducing their carbon emissions by buying these offsets for pennies on the dollar.
The issue of actually reducing carbon emissions is obscured by this shell game…
Personally, I feel the practice of “offsets” is just a monetary shell game to enable the polluters to continue profiting and polluting without responsibility.
Interesting article!
Has anyone been able to quantify the additional sequestration generated from the “sustainable forestry” practices?
Thorough studies are few and far between. But essentially it boils down to the definition(s) of carbon sequestration and what types of sequestration are desired for both short-term and long-term relief. In my general reading, it seems the “best” sequestration of both carbon and water is obtained from long-term, old-growth forests – including montane forest that encircles much of the northern hemisphere. Much of the argument revolves around the carbon gains/losses claimed by “sustainable forestry practices” that don’t always pass scrutiny. Sequestration by the soil biome in a disturbed vs. old-growth forest along with decomposition speed and levels are all factors in the equation – not just the standing trees. This “equation” is not well-defined nor is it completely understood. But enormous amounts of carbon have been sequestered successfully by forest, soil, wetland, permafrost, and oceans over Earth’s lifetime without humans “managing” or interfering with the carbon cycle.
Don’t forget the difference between carbon storage and carbon sequestration.
Storage is what is held stably in soils, plants, or bodies of water; sequestration involves the process of removing the carbon from the atmosphere and placing it in storage. Different metrics but important to understand.
Good point!
I like the idea of maintaining good forest cover to act as a sink. Contrary, it’s been proven that carbon credits don’t actually reduce carbon emissions from the big companies. As someone said above, the company will just pay for it because it’s easier, and actually cheaper. It may help maintain the forest cover on these parcels, but the overall rate of maintaining cover and the rate of emissions is still imbalanced.
Lastly, we need to promote regenerative agriculture. That’s the only way we’ll start to recapture carbon and put it back into our soils instead of the atmosphere. Less focus on carbon, more focus on sustainable farming.