A law signed by Gov. Janet Mills last week requires landowners who are participating in the forest carbon credit market to report basic data — including a landowner’s name, contact information, date of enrollment and total enrolled acreage — to the state on an annual basis, information the state will use to create a database and track the impact of carbon credits on Maine’s forests.
“We need to understand how Maine woodland owners are participating in the emerging forest carbon market, given both Maine’s forest-based economy and its climate change initiatives,” said Morten Moesswilde, the division director of Forest Policy and Management for the Department of Agriculture, Conservation and Forestry, in a work session on the legislation in February.
While there are national and international registries tracking some of this information, said Moesswilde, the data is difficult to search and presented in a variety of formats and in varying levels of detail, with information on projects buried “deep in supporting documents.” Maine would be the second state in the country to implement such a tracking system, after New Hampshire, said Moesswilde.
The law was supported by conservation organizations as well as the Maine Forest Products Council and several woodlot owners, who stressed the importance of understanding an emerging market.
“I am worried that large companies may come to Maine and buy huge blocks of carbon credits and seriously reduce our timber harvests,” James Robbins, former owner of Robbins Lumber Inc., wrote in testimony. “We need to know what is going on.”
Robbins also voiced a concern cited by many critics of the forest carbon credit market, which is that it gives large companies “a license to pollute” while claiming to be carbon neutral and “look[ing] good to the public and their shareholders.”
Supporters of the market say that, while imperfect, it presents a way to keep forests as forests and to reward landowners who practice sustainable forest management.
“There may be cases where carbon projects produce a modest climate benefit or less dramatic climate benefit than some would hope,” Mark Berry, Maine’s forest program director for The Nature Conservancy, told The Monitor in 2022. “But if they helped to keep forests on the landscape, they’re still doing some good.”
Counting our forests as carbon sinks is the one of the primary ways officials plan to get to net-zero emissions by 2045. The Maine Department of Environmental Protection estimated that in 2021, 91 percent of the state’s gross greenhouse gas emissions were “balanced by sequestration in the environment” — in other words, absorbed by forests and wetlands.
But critics point out that that figure includes carbon credits sold into the marketplace. If those forests are already being counted as offsets by another state or company, should Maine be counting them as offsetting carbon emissions here?
A 2023 report found that northern Maine’s working forests could be managed to store at least 20 percent more carbon without decreasing the level of timber production. But that will require buy-in from private landowners, who control almost all of the forested land in the state.
Maine landowners have so far been reluctant to participate in the forest carbon market. Reporting by The Monitor in 2022 found that only 3.5 percent of the state’s large landowners have made deals to sell their carbon, despite a market that has been around for decades. Small woodlot owners have also been reluctant to buy in, citing payments too low to justify the costs of complying with rigorous standards.
The law will not require landowners to report on the financial value of the credits, said Moesswilde, and will redact personal identifying information from reports and public records requests.
“The real benefit will be a trend line over time,” he said.
