Clemson workshop explores carbon market’s potential profits for S.C. landowners
CLEMSON — Ask Michael Dawson about entering the carbon market and whether he would go back and do it again, and his answer is simple: “In a skinny minute.”
The process itself, however, is more complex.
South Carolina’s Francis Beidler Forest — the world’s largest virgin cypress-tupelo swamp forest — sold roughly 450,000 carbon credits for no less than $8 per credit in California’s carbon market in 2014, and a recent Clemson Extension workshop helped South Carolina landowners learn more about the carbon market and how they can create a new revenue stream and help combat climate change.
“We had a wonderful experience with this,” said Dawson, retired center director of the Audubon Center and Sanctuary at Francis Beidler Forest. “It is a commitment, it’s a big project and you have to be serious about it, but our net result was wonderful and, if your land will warrant it, I recommend it wholeheartedly.”
As part of the Carbon Market for South Carolina project, funded by the Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS), the Clemson workshop focused on educating the state’s forest landowners about the amount of carbon sequestered through various forest management activities and how they can be sellers of carbon credits from their forest areas.
“Our goal was to investigate information about the California carbon market for landowners in the state of South Carolina and also training graduate students to be future professionals in this market,” said Marzieh Motallebi, an assistant professor at Clemson University’s Belle W. Baruch Institute of Coastal Ecology and Forest Science. “Improving forest management practices can improve wildlife health, improve soil quality and water quality and enhance biodiversity.”
Forests act as carbon sinks and play an important role in combating climate change and its impacts caused by human activities. Greenhouse gas emissions anywhere affect the global environment and people everywhere, leading to a push for international cooperation in combating climate change.
Some notable market-based programs to reduce greenhouse gas emissions include the European Union’s Emissions Trading System, the Northeast Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative and the Midwestern Regional Greenhouse Gas Reduction Accord.
But the Extension workshop was focused on California’s Cap-and-Trade Program (CA-CTP), the second-largest carbon market in the world with the aim of reducing California’s GHG emissions to 1990 levels by 2020. The California carbon market also has the highest carbon price in the world.
Sarah Wescott, forest program manager of the Climate Action Reserve in California, discussed how California’s program is pioneering a unique way to reduce the impact of climate change by helping forest owners around the U.S. change the way they manage their land and offering a credit for each extra ton of carbon dioxide their trees sequester.
People and companies in California that are required by the state to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions can purchase the credits, each of which are worth about $10. Since 2013, about 3 million tons of forest offsets have been purchased and used by California emitters each year — the equivalent to taking every passenger vehicle in the state off the road for a week.
“Offsets are a useful tool to provide different industries that are not regulated to reduce their emissions,” Wescott said. “And so once they generate those credits, those sellers will transact the credits with buyers that are wanting to reduce their emissions voluntarily or required to reduce their emissions by some sort of state law or cap-and-trade program.”
Wescott said the credits are issued through an ongoing monitoring, reporting and verification program under which landowners monitor their forests, calculate the actual carbon reductions and verify it through a third party.
“In order to ensure the quality of offsets, we have several standards that our protocols all have to meet,” she said. “We want to make sure that the reductions are real. Th