Aggregating terrestrial credits for the voluntary carbon market sounds like a fairly esoteric enterprise to most, but for Ducks Unlimited—a 70-year-old conservation organization that has worked with thousands of landowners on projects covering 11 million acres of land—pulling together land for CO2 sequestration was a natural evolution of its services. Unlike trading centers or investment funds, Ducks Unlimited aggregates land credits, matching groups of private landowners with energy companies seeking to offset their green house gas emissions. Now, two years after thousands of hardwood seedlings were planted on 400 acres of former farmland, Ducks Unlimited and the 25 energy companies with whom they partnered can tick off a list of achievements – sequestering greenhouse gas emissions, restoring forests, reducing erosion, preventing floods and improving water quality. Meanwhile, landowners got paid for turning marginal farmland into forests.

News notes are courtesy of Southern Forests Network News Notes
www.southernsustainableforests.org