Letters: Carbon trading for forestersa complicated process

As a California licensed forester, I read with great interest the June 25 column, "Preserve trees, make money, save the planet."

The column implies that this carbon-trading business is a big windfall for forest landowners in California. To date only two properties have been certified under this carbon-trading program. Part of this lack of participation is due to the requirements of the program itself. The minimum project size for a carbon-trading program is 100 acres. Another required element of the program is that the landowner must enroll the property to a perpetual conservation easement. This easement severely limits what the owner can or cannot do with the property.

A large expense that the column failed to mention is the financial outlay that the landowner must cover to determine the amount of carbon that can be traded. The volume of carbon on the property must be determined according to specific protocols. Once this baseline of carbon is determined and a plan developed for the carbon trade the plan is reviewed and certified by a third-party auditor.

Once this audit is completed the carbon may be traded. All of this planning and review must be paid for by the landowner. After the property is certified it must be recertified every six years, at the owner's expense, in order to continue to trade carbon. This entire process is complex and very expensive.

It should also be pointed out that once an area is harvested the carbon is not released back into the atmosphere as the column states. The carbon within the trees stays as carbon in the lumber and merely gets relocated as a useable wood product such as a home. For small landowners who cannot afford to have their property certified if would be cheaper to just sell their carbon as wood products and avoid the carbon market.

The last point that I would like to make is that of ethics. Should an owner of forest carbon "sell" off his resource so that another user of carbon in another part of the world can continue to pollute the environment?

Jim Erler

Crescent City