Carbon Forecasting Tool for Landowners

In the Northern Forest, it can easily be two or three decades between major timber harvests on a single parcel, especially for small woodland owners, and yet property taxes and other expenses come due every year.

The partners in the Northern Forest Investment Zone initiative are helping landowners take advantage of ways to earn income from the important services that healthy forestland provides to the public, such as filtering water and keeping carbon out of the atmosphere. The Center is helping to fund these projects and connect them to other ecosystem projects in the region.

A perfect example is Sebago Lake in Maine, which supplies water to 200,000 people in greater Portland. The water is so clean that the city water district has saved $75 million because it is not required to build a water treatment plant.

“If the water flowing into Sebago is not kept clean, the people in Portland will see their water utility costs rise overnight,” says John Gunn, Ph.D., senior program leader at Manomet Center for Conservation Sciences, which is one of The Center’s partners in the Northern Forest Investment Zone. “We’re trying to make that connection more explicit and use the market to reward good actors for protecting services maintained by healthy private forests.”

The carbon secured in the trees across the Northern Forest also represents potential value, but landowners don’t know much about the market yet. To help, Manomet is developing an evaluation tool. “It will be almost like Turbo Tax,” says John. “They’ll work through a series of questions about the property, and we’ll build in some of the cost information they need to know so a landowner can look objectively at the potential income he could receive from the sale of carbon.”

John hopes to have a working version of the carbon financial assessment tool ready by year end, and have a finished version ready for workshops in the spring.

“It may be worthwhile for smaller landowners to get into the carbon market, especially if they can earn enough to cover their property taxes," says John. "The income could help them keep the land in the family, or at least compensate the landowner for the benefits his land is providing to society."