Written by The Conservation Fund

In February 2008, the Garcia River Forest Project was listed with the Climate Action Reserve after a four-year journey toward becoming the first forest in California and in the Climate Action Reserve to manage a working forest for use in the voluntary offset market.

To date, the Conservation Fund and its partners have acquired more than 40,000 acres of forestland. By acquiring these properties, the Fund and its partners sought to demonstrate that these large tracts of intensively managed coastal forest can gradually be returned to sustainable timber production and ecological vitality through the use of innovative financing and patient management.

To accomplish this, the Fund had to go to places it has not been before—into large, working landscapes where they had to consider not only ecological processes and the needs of natural communities, but also the social, political and economic complexities of human communities. This new terrain required that the Conservation Fund learn new things that were foreign to their traditional focus and that they try new concepts not usually associated with conservation as they had known it.

The Garcia River spills into the Pacific Ocean 100 miles north of San Francisco at Point Arena. Like most large timbered properties in the region, the Garcia River Forest was owned by a succession of timber companies, each attempting to work the forest hard enough to meet the demands of their lenders and investors. This history of intensive industrial timber management left a legacy of depleted inventories of merchantable timber, a network of fragile roads on steep slopes of eroding soils, and miles of spawning habitat for salmon and steelhead clogged with sediments.

It was apparent that the Fund needed an approach to conservation that took into account the unrelenting annual costs of maintenance and management, the need for restoration of habitat for coho salmon and steelhead trout, and the importance of the forest to the future of the local timber economy. The Garcia River property presented an opportunity to try this approach which, if successful, would be replicable across the region and enable the protection of North Coast forestland to occur at a scale previously beyond the Fund’s reach, even beyond its imagination.

The Conservation Fund partnered with the State Coastal Conservancy, the Wildlife Conservation Board and The Nature Conservancy to acquire the 24,000-acre Garcia River Forest in 2004. Their goal was to demonstrate that the non-profit ownership and management of a large, industrial timber property is a viable conservation strategy in a region where current timber values and land use trends instead encourage subdivision.

Upon acquisition of the Garcia River Forest, The Conservation Fund and The Nature Conservancy contracted with Jordan Golinkoff, then a graduate student at the University of Montana to prepare the project submittal documents necessary to register the forest with the California Climate Action Registry. At the time, the forest protocols were still being developed and the prospects for verifying and selling forest carbon offsets seemed remote, but the Fund was excited about the Registry’s potential and eagerly pursued registration.

With the adoption by the California Registry of the Forest Protocol in 2007, the Fund pursued verification in earnest, beginning with the convening of the audit team in the Fund’s Caspar office. The Fund was fortunate to be joined by staff from the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection and others who were interested in seeing the Protocols put to work by SGS and Scientific Certification Systems. Concurrently, the California Air Resources Board (CARB) was holding hearings to consider adopting the Protocol as an early action measure under AB 32, California’s Global Warming Solutions Act. In October 2007, CARB adopted the Protocols, a singular act that vaulted the Protocols to an unprecedented level of acceptance and credibility in the emergent voluntary offset market.

Shortly after CARB adopted the Protocols, the California Public Utilities Commission approved Pacific Gas and Electric Company’s ClimateSmart program, an ambitious program by which PG&E offered its ratepayers an opportunity to make a voluntary payment that PG&E would in turn apply to Reserve-verified projects that offset GHG emissions related to the participating customers’ energy usage. Adoption of the Protocols by CARB, followed by the commitment by PG&E to exclusively use Reserve-verified offsets for its ClimateSmart program, was a watershed event that brought the use of forest-based forest offsets, and the Climate Action Reserve program, to national attention.

In February of 2008, The Conservation Fund and PG&E announced an agreement for the sale of 200,000 tons of Garcia River Forest offsets to PG&E, to be delivered over 5 years starting in 2008. Other transactions have followed, with more than 600,000 Garcia River Forest Climate Reserrve Tonnes (CRTs) put under contract in 2008, essentially fully allocating the accrued and future CRTs expected to accrue through 2012.