Projects

Creating a Safe Deposit Box for Carbon -
Tasmanian Improved Forestry Management Project

This project demonstrates the commercial viability of valuing environmental assets and securing an alternative income from the carbon market rather than clearing and logging native forest land.

As Australia prepares for introduction of its Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme, Redd Forests Pty Ltd has created a carbon-abatement and sequestration project on 860 hectares of privately owned native forest land in Tasmania. It has acquired the logging and carbon sequestration rights to this land and will, effectively, lock them up in a virtual carbon safe-deposit box for a period of 25 years. The effect of this will be to prevent deforestation and degradation and, instead, allow the land to regenerate and sequester carbon thus reducing Australia’s greenhouse gas emissions and protecting the land for the next generation.

See the full Project Design Document at the CCBS website:

Media

The Australian Financial Review - May 2-3, 2009

Enlarge for reading

While bureaucrats twiddle their thumbs, local projects are blocked for at least three years ...

"... They will not support those who are actually reducing emissions ..."

The Australian - July 27, 2009

Reddy for returns

Redd Forests CEO Stephen Dickey says the significance of the deal is that it shows landowners can generate better returns through sequestration than they can from commercial logging. "It's a simple arbitrage between the value of pulp and the value of carbon. We said let us assess the carbon value of land that has been selectively cleared for years and the point has been proved."

Dickey says Redd Forests is now looking to protect larger tracts of threatened forest land and aims to generate a portfolio of half-a-million hectares in Australia in the next five years.

Schemes such as REDD have been designed specifically to protect rainforests in developing countries and to help developed countries meet their greenhouse gas emission reduction targets.

But Dickey also sees great potential in using voluntary carbon markets to protect forests in Australia -- where a recent ANU study has pointed to the greater carbon density in eucalypt forests than even some tropical rainforests -- and the Pacific northwest of the US.

"We need to stop cutting down forests in the developed world as well as developing world," Dickey says. Such carbon credits could be more attractive to buyers because there is less sovereign risk and greater confidence in compliance, and they could therefore be sold at a premium.

Mongabay - July 27, 2009

Tasmania gets Australia's first CCB-certified
REDD deal

Project will pay landowners not to log old-growth forests in Tasmania.

A forest conservation project in Tasmania has become Australia's first Reduced Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation (REDD) project to meet Climate, Community and Biodiversity Standards.

The project, run by Sydney-based Redd Forests, is on 860 hectares of private land in Tasmania. Logging of old-growth forests in Tasmania is increasingly controversial: environmentalists regularly clash — sometimes violently — with forestry companies.

For full article, click here