Bill McKibben, Author & 350.org Co-founder
Wild nature has intrinsic value and deserves to exist for its own sake. In addition, forever-wild conservation is among the most cost-efficient and immediate actions we can take to confront rapid climate change and mass species loss. Recent studies confirm the incredible ability of old, wild forests to absorb carbon. Scientists have reported the importance of allowing forests to mature—a conservation strategy called Proforestation—that when applied to specific places in a complementary manner with surrounding managed woodlands, proves to be an effective and scalable natural climate solution. These forests are better at storing carbon than any technology, and aren’t powered by fossil fuels! (As Bill McKibben says, “Also, they’re beautiful.”) Unmanaged forests offer additional benefits: preventing extinction, allowing life to evolve alongside a changing climate, and connecting wildlife corridors for far-ranging species.
The window is narrowing, and the land trust community must act quickly while we still can. Every forest we protect as wilderness today will become an old-growth forest of tomorrow. The Wildlands Partnership offers a streamlined, cost-effective way to make a difference for nature while doing what land trusts do best: saving places for future generations.
MAINE
CONNECTICUT
Greta Thunberg, climate activist
Financial support for your organization
Northeast Wilderness Trust will contribute to your forever-wild conservation project, including:
Wildlands Partners may enroll properties in the carbon market upon conserving them as forever-wild.
Technical assistance and outreach
As the only regional land trust focused exclusively on wilderness conservation, Northeast Wilderness Trust will be a resource for Wildlands Partners. Northeast Wilderness Trust will be on call to offer technical assistance and guidance as your land trust navigates wilderness protection.
Upon completing your forever-wild conservation project, Northeast Wilderness Trust will celebrate your success by:
Size is an important factor and properties (or aggregated bundles of parcels) larger than 500 acres are preferred. However, projects are chosen based on several criteria, including resilience, biodiversity, and conservation context. Sometimes smaller blocks are still priorities for forever-wild conservation because they are exceptionally resilient to climate change, important for wildlife, or adjacent to already conserved lands. Northeast Wilderness Trust may also aggregate a collection of multiple small properties that can be conserved as forever-wild all at once. If in doubt, contact sophie@newildernesstrust.org.
Proposed projects will be evaluated for enrollment in the Wildlands Partnership according to Northeast Wilderness Trust’s standard Land Protection criteria with an emphasis on:
Perpetuity is a long time. All land trusts should secure conservation easements on land they own in case their land trust goes out of business. Northeast Wilderness Trust practices what it preaches and encumbers all of the land it owns with partner land trusts. This is often referred to as “belt and suspender” conservation.
Northeast Wilderness Trust invests money into the Wildlands Partnership from private donors and charitable foundations with the expectation of collaboration with similarly-accredited land trusts. While the Wilderness Trust is aware that there are many excellent land trusts that have not pursued accreditation, this process provides assurance that land trust partners have best-management practices in place, and are financially and institutionally prepared to steward their conserved lands in perpetuity.
Additionally, Northeast Wilderness Trust can secure the best returns from the Wild Carbon program for partner land trusts by reducing risks (i.e. insolvency or carbon offset reversals). The American Carbon Registry (ACR) is the organization that certifies voluntary-market carbon projects like those in the Wild Carbon program. As part of this process, the ACR uses a rigorous risk analysis to determine the likelihood that all enrolled carbon projects will remain viable for the entire 40-year term. Accreditation lowers risk factors and allows properties to generate reliable carbon credits.
On forever-wild properties, nature is allowed to take its course with minimal management or interference. For this reason, the landowner generally gives up rights to build structures or roads, subdivide, conduct commercial or industrial activities, farm, and cut timber. Landowners generally retain the rights to use the land for non-motorized, non-mechanized recreation, and to post the land against public use, including hunting. Conservation easements offer flexibility, however, and Northeast Wilderness Trust works closely with landowners to craft an easement that best suits the landowner’s goals for the particular property.
Public access to your property for non-mechanized recreation would continue under the provisions of a forever-wild easement, if you want it to. There is no requirement for public access. If you want to permit fishing or hunting of abundant prey species on your land, you may. All forever-wild conservation easements prohibit mechanized (mountain biking) and motorized (ATVs, snowmobiles) recreation. While maintenance of existing trails is allowed, construction of new trails is generally not allowed. Bird watching, canoeing, cross-country skiing, hiking, and snow-shoeing are all examples of activities compatible with conserved wilderness. The object is not to keep people off the land, but to minimize human impacts on wildlife and natural communities.
For all land trusts in the Wildlands Partnership, Northeast Wilderness Trust will offset costs of developing and stewarding a forever-wild conservation easement, including due diligence, legal costs, stewardship endowment contribution, and staff time. The Wilderness Trust will also provide guidance and expertise on wilderness conservation and stewardship at no cost to participating land trusts.
In some cases, Northeast Wilderness Trust will also provide capital for acquisition of properties that a land trust does not yet own, but would like to purchase and protect as forever-wild.
A land trust may then elect to receive ongoing, unrestricted income from their forever-wild land by enrolling it in the Wild Carbon program. In these cases, Northeast Wilderness Trust will pay for the initial timber cruise to assess the property’s carbon inventory. (This is the first step in generating carbon credits to sell.) Net income from the sale of carbon credits on the forever-wild property goes to the partner land trust. Costs that are deducted from the gross carbon revenue prior to distribution include third-party costs for development, compliance and marketing, and the Wilderness Trust’s administrative fee. Our aim for the Wild Carbon program is to pass on 100% of net revenue to our land trust partners. Since our goal in creating the Wildlands Partnership program is to accelerate the pace of wildlands conservation in the Northeast, we developed a Wild Carbon program that will create revenue for land trusts that want to collaborate on wilderness conservation.
After initial exploratory conversations, the Wildlands Partnership proceeds as following:
Click here to download the Wildlands Partnership Intake Steps.
The administrative fee helps Northeast Wilderness Trust cover our personnel cost for performing the duties of the project Sponsor. In this role, NEWT conducts outreach to land trusts, assists with their enrollment, maintains brand recognition for credits generated by Wildlands Carbon, and monitors the project for the best interest of the landowners. Northeast Wilderness Trust’s own independent fundraising—not the carbon program—funds our direct financial support to our Wildlands Partners (grant awards for due diligence, stewardship funds, staff time, and acquisition costs.)
Stewardship Staff Capacity: There will not be any demands on your stewardship team beyond what will already be required to monitor the forever-wild conservation easement. Enforcing the terms of the conservation easement is wholly consistent with ensuring that there is no “carbon reversal.” Carbon reversal happens when trees are cut down. Timber harvest and clearing land for construction are examples of actions that would result in carbon reversal. Since these uses will be restricted by the Forever-Wild easement, adhering to the Wildlands Carbon program entails the same requirements of managing a property as wilderness: maintaining boundary signage, monitoring properties to prevent third-party violations such as timber theft, and refraining from all activities restricted by the easement.
Administrative Staff Capacity: As Sponsor, Northeast Wilderness Trust administers all aspects of the Wildlands Carbon program in conjunction with the project Manager. Your land trust will have minimal work to do, which will mostly consist of gathering information we will need at the outset, such as property shapefiles, titles, copies of existing restrictions or easements, and current management plans. (It is likely that most of these documents will already have been shared with us when we discuss terms for the forever-wild conservation easement.) You will need a staff person to reply to the Wilderness Trust when we reach out to you for logistics such as: confirming dates that a forestry crew may need to visit your property to inventory or verify the status of its trees (your staff will not need to be present), or when we notify you of carbon income that will be coming to you after a credit sale.
The Wildlands Carbon LLC – not your land trust – will be the project proponent and will thereby be responsible to the carbon registry for the management of the Wildlands Carbon initiative for the life of the project. The project Sponsor and Manager will shepherd the project through all aspects of carbon inventories, credit verification, credit issuance, and sale of credits. Since the land trust is not the project proponent, there is no legal mechanism for the carbon registry to tap your land trust to pay any costs associated with managing the project or verifying any credit issuances.
Upon enrollment in Wildlands Carbon, your land trust will commit itself to a “No-Harvest” land management plan for the term of the carbon project. If your land trust were to violate that commitment, and were to intentionally harvest trees during the life of the project, it would be responsible for reimbursing the Wildlands Carbon LLC for a proportional number of carbon credits. This is what is known in the industry as an “intentional reversal” of carbon credits--if you’ve been issued carbon credits to sell based on the estimated sequestration and storage of carbon by trees on your property, you cannot turn around and cut down the very trees that earned those credits for you.
Worth noting, of course, is that your land trust will already have granted the timber rights to Northeast Wilderness Trust in the forever-wild conservation easement whether or not you enroll in Wildlands Carbon. Your land trust would have to egregiously violate the conservation easement in order to find itself in an “intentional reversal” situation with the carbon project; a situation all parties expect to be highly unlikely! While the carbon project ends after 40 years, the conservation easement is perpetual.
None. Northeast Wilderness Trust has designed the Wildlands Carbon program to eliminate the financial risk of participating in the carbon offset market, while helping land trusts generate carbon revenue from setting aside wild forests. The project developer will finance all upfront costs for project development, and will only be reimbursed for that investment after the project has generated revenue from credit sales. When your land trust decides it is serious about pursuing carbon revenue, our staff can walk you through some hypothetical numbers to give you a clearer sense of the possible revenue you could expect by entering your property in the Wildlands Carbon program. The important thing to remember is that your proportional share of all expenses (for project development, administration and compliance) will come out of the gross carbon revenue your properties generate. Your land trust will not have any financial exposure; the expenses only affect the total net revenue you will receive from credit sales.
Northeast Wilderness Trust's only benefit from administering the program will result from the additional conservation of wildlands that your land trust will be doing as a result of being a partner in the Wildlands Partnership. Northeast Wilderness Trust does not intend to, need to, or expect to make any money off of the Wildlands Carbon program. Our vision is that the Wildlands Carbon program will create an incentive for your land trust to join the Wildlands Partnership. In lieu of timber revenue, which will no longer be available to your land trust once the Wilderness Trust holds a forever-wild easement on your property, your land trust will have access to revenue from selling Wildlands Carbon credits. We will be transparent about our fee structure, the projected costs of managing the project, and the revenue we reasonably anticipate for your land trust.
The carbon registries require that forest-related carbon projects contribute a percentage (usually 18%) of the generated carbon reduction credits to an internal insurance program called a buffer pool. The registry uses this pool of reserved credits to cover the cost of reversals due to natural causes. Land trusts are therefore not liable for reductions in predicted carbon-sequestration rates due to natural causes. (Such events would affect the number of future carbon credits that could be generated, however.)
The buffer pool does not cover carbon reversals that are due to intentional human activity. If there is a significant loss of tree cover on an enrolled property that is the result of direct human action, the project proponent (in this case the project developer) is required to refund to the registry the carbon credits that can no longer be verified. Put more simply, the carbon credits are issued by the registry based on the projected rate of carbon sequestration on the properties. If, due to human activity, the rate of sequestration turns out to be significantly less than anticipated on the property, then some of the carbon credits that have already been issued (or the equivalent dollar amount) have to be refunded. For this reason, the Landowner Agreement that participating land trusts sign to enroll in Wildlands Carbon stipulates that the land trust will be responsible for covering reversal costs that result from intentional actions on its own enrolled properties. This also protects each participating land trust from any violations or gross negligence on the part of the other land trusts in the project—your revenue will not be in jeopardy if another land trust in the aggregated project violates the terms of its enrollment.
No. Northeast Wilderness Trust is investing time and resources in the Wildlands Carbon Program specifically in order to accelerate the pace of wildlands conservation in the Northeast. The Wilderness Trust’s goal is to expand wilderness; in exchange, our land trust partners receive the revenue from the Wildlands Carbon program with zero financial risk or liability.
Other options to enroll in a carbon market may exist for lands that are producing timber, and we can refer land trusts to these programs if wilderness conservation is not the right fit.
At this point in time, land with a forever-wild easement may only be enrolled in a forest-carbon project for one 40-year term. Carbon offset credits have market value because they show that a project will increase the level of carbon sequestration above and beyond what would otherwise happen on that land. Placement of a forever-wild conservation easement permanently withdraws your protected property from the timber base, and thereby creates the conditions for increased and perpetual additional carbon storage. Future forest-carbon projects cannot be developed on the same land because the trees will at that point already be permanently protected from logging. For this reason, enrollment in the Wildlands Carbon project must occur within one year of recording a forever-wild conservation easement. The Northeast Wilderness Trust will facilitate and guide the timing of this process for all partners. Carbon markets are new and evolving, and the registry protocols with them. The carbon development rights revert to the landowner (you, the land trust) after the completion of the Wildlands Carbon Project. If, at some future time there is another type of carbon project a land trust can develop on its property, you would retain the legal right to do that.
Participating in the Wildlands Partnership does not mean your land trust has to enroll in our Wildlands Carbon program. You may choose not to participate in the carbon offset market at all, or you may choose to investigate developing your own carbon project with a carbon project developer. Whether or not it is possible, or advisable, for you to develop a project solely on your land trust’s properties depends on several factors. The most significant factors are likely to be the total acreage you have eligible to enroll, your staff’s capacity—both knowledge and time—to take on the development of a project, and your Board’s willingness to assume all of the related risk and liability.
The main reasons land trusts choose not to develop their own projects are:
There are several benefits to the Wildlands Carbon program that are not found in other forest carbon programs.
Questions about the Wildlands Partnership? Reach out to Caitlin at caitlin [@] newildernesstrust.org or 802.224.1000 ext. 112.
Questions about carbon credits? Reach out to Sophie at sophie [@] newildernesstrust.org or 802.224.1000 ext. 103.
Photography by Shelby Perry. Frenchman Bay Community Forest video by Jerry Monkman/Reel Quest Films. Cornwall Easement video by Abby Wilson.
NORTHEAST WILDERNESS TRUST
17 STATE STREET, SUITE 302
MONTPELIER, VT 05602
802.224.1000
info [@] newildernesstrust.org
NORTHEAST WILDERNESS TRUST
17 STATE STREET, SUITE 302
MONTPELIER, VT 05602
802.224.1000
© The Northeast Wilderness Trust 2020 TERMS OF USE PRIVACY POLICY
