Carbon forestry partnerships in northern California

Since 2005 New Forests (NF) has managed a portfolio of sustainable timber plantations, rural land, and conservation investments related to ecosystem restoration and protection. NF’s investments are located in the Asia-Pacific region and the USA and include approximately 950,000 hectares. Forest Carbon Partners (FCP) has been one of NF’s most successful investment vehicles, financing and developing forest carbon offset projects for the California carbon market since 2011. Through FCP, NF partners with landowners, including more than half a dozen Native American tribes, to finance and develop forest carbon offsets on their lands. These carbon offsets are then sold to companies regulated under the California Cap-and-Trade system. One of FCP’s earliest projects exemplifies the possibility in such landscape environmental finance partnerships. Through a path-breaking FCP-brokered carbon forestry project with the Yurok Native American tribe in NW California, carbon trading has become an important economic resource for the tribe, who invests part of its new assets in buying more land to add to the Reservation’s roughly 56,000 acres, which it manages as a landscape mosaic.