By PAULA TRACY, InDepthNH.org
CONCORD – Lawmakers received an overview of carbon forest science and new markets that are giving forest landowners an additional revenue stream outside of logging.
On Tuesday they heard from a New Hampshire expert on the subject who said while this is an emerging market it is not growing out of control right now.
That is in part borne out by New Hampshire’s new carbon registry https://www.nhdfl.dncr.nh.gov/sites/g/files/ehbemt866/files/inline-documents/sonh/nh_carbon_registry_8_11_2025.pdf which shows that less than 4 percent of the state’s landmass is enrolled with 186,000 acres total, and just one of the 12 is 141,000 acres owned by one company at the northern tip of the state, Aurora Sustainable Lands that acquired the Connecticut Lakes Headwaters.
The issue came to a head in 2023 when loggers and mill owners saw a dramatic reduction in lumber coming from the Connecticut Lakes Headwaters property because the state holds an easement on that land that is now still being negotiated. Carbon sequestration impacted local revenues because of the loss of timber taxes.
Charles A. Levesque, president of Innovative Natural Resource Solutions LLC https://www.inrsllc.com/about.html who helped found the Northeast Forest Carbon and Climate
Partnership https://northeastforestcarbon.org/ told legislators that this is “all about climate change.”
He gave the presentation to the joint House/Senate Carbon Sequestration Program’s Study Committee at One Granite Place in Concord. The committee will work for the coming months to understand and perhaps suggest possible legislation as the state faces the advent of timber tracts being used for carbon sequestration.
Currently there is a two-year moratorium on new carbon farms in the state while its impacts are being studied. Things like forest ecology, taxation and land use issues are to be explored but first the legislators needed to know a bit of terminology, background and that is what they learned.
Levesque stressed that without climate change and the greenhouse effect of a warming atmosphere there would be no carbon forest market. But because factories and businesses either want to reach zero carbon emissions goals or are being regulated to do so in places like California, markets are out there to buy carbon credits to leave the trees standing.
CLIMATE SCIENCE AND SOME NEW VOCABULARY
Levesque said there is a direct correlation between increased temperature and increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere as seen in tiny bubbles in core ice from thousands of years ago studied in Antarctica.
“We’re trapping more heat and the climate will change,” he said.
He gave the legislators a primer on language related to this with the important definitions. The term “carbon storage” is the amount of carbon an acre or whatever unit being discussed and “carbon sequestration” is the overall process of capturing and storing carbon dioxide over time to mitigate climate change.
He had legislators recall their high school biology lessons and the process of photosynthesis. He said the trees have a process of taking in carbon dioxide, storing it, though he noted no two trees are alike.
Hardwood trees don’t photosynthesize in the winter. They shut down once they drop their leaves while pines and other conifers don’t entirely shut down. Variations are also based on soils, temperatures, moisture, exposure, elevation and all have different growth levels along with age and size.
About half of the dry weight of wood in trees is carbon, he said. Young trees and old trees are different. Younger forests like those found in abundance in New Hampshire sequester more carbon than aging and dying trees, he said.
Foresters can make decisions to improve growth rates, such as cleaning up dead wood or clearcutting areas or letting trees grow longer and staggering harvests that enhance the overall goals of the landowner. A lot of wildlife species will not thrive in older forests, he noted, including rough grouse which need a young forest.
The state’s objective should be to have a mix of young and old forests, he said. The trees growing on this side of the continent are much different from the West Coast in terms of this carbon sequestration with this area having a net benefit for carbon sequestration projects.
While the land here naturally regenerates its own forest, planting can also be done to achieve diversity of species and accelerate the process.
Big logging machines that used to come into a harvest or partial area used to damage trees left standing a lot more than they do now because science has shown that damage impacts growth and increases mortality. And a lot of the logging is done in the winter to do less soil damage, where carbon is also stored.
Maine has also been looking at this issue and Levesque said they have found the biggest bang for the buck is to avoid forest conversion into permanent housing and parking lots.
“It costs the least amount of money and the most benefit,” he said, when it comes to climate change.
THE EMERGENCE OF CARBON MARKETS
Markets have developed over the past decade to take advantage of that carbon sequestration by letting the trees grow instead of cutting them, Levesque said.
Factories and businesses that are emitting fossil fuels who either want to reach zero emission goals or need to by law can either do that themselves through making their operations greener or they can purchase carbon credits on both the private market and the regulated California Air Resources market.
This is a new way for landowners to generate revenue rather than primarily logging as in the past.
“One of the ways that have come up to offset those emissions is this concept of carbon credits,” he said, which is an overall category. Forest credits are a subset. But there are other markets like wind farms and other renewables where companies can buy carbon credits. California is moving away from new out-of-state carbon projects, he said.
There is also a voluntary carbon marketplace, he said, and those are not regulated, so far. The commitments are for 40 years there compared to 100 years on the compliance markets.
Microsoft, American Airlines, Amazon have spent hundreds of millions of dollars on the voluntary markets due to their own reasons for wanting to be more green and are not required to do so by law, he noted.
“This marketplace is worth a lot of money,” he said, adding it is expected to continue, worldwide though its growth is not crazy right now. These markets do have standards.
Landowners need to prove their ownership, and growth is verifiable on a third-party basis. There are enforceable penalties that could be substantial, he added and is a real serious deterrent.
Eric Murphy of the NH Retail Lumber Association asked Levesque if carbon farms change land management practices.
Levesque said with third-party oversight it is happening much less often now.
“This is actually supposed to benefit the planet. It certainly can benefit a landowner,” he said. Carbon developments are in two sets: those with the larger tracts of 10,000 acres or more and those smaller than 5,000. Anybody with a few hundred acres had no place to go, but now they do.
ALTERNATIVES FOR FOREST OWNERS – CONSERVATION EASEMENTS
Those who don’t want to do any of this can, under the Natural Resource Conservation Service, have other tools keeping forest forests including conservation easements, Levesque said.
A land trust community in New Hampshire exists -including the state’s Land and Community Heritage Investment Program – which has been able to purchase those easements to ensure forests continue. He told lawmakers that it is a complicated new aspect to the world of forestry and urged them to go to the northeastforestcaron.org website to search for answers.
THE CONCEPT OF “LEAKAGE”
Is this carbon thing all a bit of a shell game, or the idea that if you press one end of a toothpaste tube it goes to the other end with no overall benefit? Does this somehow lead to fewer trees being cut on the planet?
This is the one thing that Levesque said he is concerned about. And he called it “leakage…the planet as a whole has a demand for wood products. If you don’t harvest, someone else will.
“It still concerns me,” he said.
TRENDS
Using maps showing the tracts that are registered in both the compliance and voluntary markets, Levesque said the growth is now more slow. In 2013, the first market emerged in California. He said there is less than 5 percent growth in carbon market sales.
“Data shows it is not going off the rails and is growing very slowly,” he said.
Maine has about 7 percent of its forestland in these projects. Not all credits are created equal and not all are valued the same, Levesque said.
“Unless the market price changes drastically,” Levesque said, he is doubtful that huge numbers of acres will be in carbon sequestration. In the voluntary market those who bought before 2022 were throwing their cash around before there was information that this has a global benefit.
He said the Integrity Counsel for the Voluntary Carbon Market https://icvcm.org/ has developed core market principals being demanded by buyers. “It took a long time for that to happen,” he said.
Members of the committee have some time to digest all that and get online to do some homework. They will not be meeting in December but will resume study of carbon markets in January.