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Cash for Carbon: A woodland Owner's Guide for Accessing
Carbon Markets
A general discussion of carbon markets and how agricultural projects that
sequester carbon may participate.
https://secure.agriculture.purdue.edu/store/item.asp?itemID=18785
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Tax Treatment of Carbon Sequestration Costs and Income
This article presents W.L. Hoover's analysis of how the costs and revenues
associated with carbon sequestration contracts should be treated for Federal
income tax purposes.
http://www.timbertax.org/publications/articles/tree_farmer/jan_feb_09.asp
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CVal: A Carbon Valuation Tool for
Foresters and Private Forest Landowners
The CVal spreadsheet is a powerful tool that will help foresters, managers, and
project developers work with private forest landowners to assess the economic
profitability of participating in carbon markets. CVal provides a
discounted cash flow analysis based on a full accounting of
variables, including tract size,
carbon sequestration rate, carbon price, and enrollment and trading
costs. Automated, financial break-even analyses in the macros version quickly
assess threshold values of key variables for profitable projects, and the
program readily performs "what if" calculations
after storing starting values. CVal was designed to evaluate managed forest and
afforestation projects traded on the
Chicago Climate Exchange,
but its methodology could be adapted for other trading mechanisms and
agricultural sequestration projects. Documentation is provided in the program
itself and in GTR-180. CVal was developed by Ted Bilek (USFS
Forest Products Lab),
Peter Becker (Eastern Ozarks Forestry Council), and Tim McAbee (LandMark
Systems), and is available at no cost.
Download CVal and GTR-180 at:
http://www.fpl.fs.fed.us/documnts/fplgtr/fpl_gtr180.html
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Differentiation Among Aggregators Offering Managed Forest Offset Contracts for
the CCX
The
Chicago Climate Exchange (CCX) registers and trades
carbon offsets from various types of
land management projects.
Relatively few Aggregators offer contracts for managed forest projects, which
are more complicated than
afforestation or other agricultural projects. There are broad similiarities
among the Aggregators offering managed forest projects because they must comply
with CCX protocols. A matrix emphasizing points of differentiation has been
prepared to compare three Aggregators (AgraGate Climate Credits Corporation, the
Delta Institute, and Forecon EcoMarket Solutions LLC) with respect to their
contract and forest inventory requirements and other services.
Download a copy
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Tally Transformation
This utility workbook uses a macro to transform inventory data from timber
cruise tally sheets into a tree-by-tree listing of plot, tree number,
species, and diameter class. Such a listing may be useful as input to
growth and yield models.
Download a copy
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Beyond the 10% Solution: Promoting Family Forest Management
through Carbon Trading
MoCARB: The Missouri Forest Carbon Working Group
January 2008
The existence of voluntary carbon trading markets in the United States
reflects both the participants’ desire for such a service and their anticipation
of its eventual necessity. Some have questioned whether carbon trading is a
“license to pollute”. It is, but that license will become increasingly
restricted when mandatory cap-and trade of carbon emissions occurs. Market
mechanisms are imperfect, but combined with some regulation, they worked to
quickly and efficiently reduce sulfur dioxide emissions by electric power
plants. For these reasons, the Introduction of this study discusses the
philosophy and economics of carbon trading as it relates to forestry offsets.
This study’s objective is to identify the barriers to enrollment of
Missouri’s
managed small (<200 ac) family forests in the CCX’s carbon offset
program and to develop a plan of action to minimize those barriers.
MoCarb White Paper
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Sample Size Requirements for Estimation of
Carbon Sequestration in Missouri’s Managed Family Forests
Peter Becker, PhD
(January, 2008)
Summary
Enrollment of managed forests in the carbon offset program of the Chicago
Climate Exchange (CCX) requires an inventory based accounting of carbon stocks.
For carbon sequestration estimated by a growth and yield model, the CCX applies
a discount of twice the error in the baseline inventory, up to a maximum of 20%.
Error is calculated as the two-tailed, 90% half confidence
interval divided by the mean. Missouri forest inventories of saw timber volume
based on 10-basal area factor (variable radius) plots have a coefficient of
variation tending to 60%. Such variation would require more than 100 plots to
avoid the CCX’s maximum discount, a sampling intensity that would be impractical
in forests smaller than 300 ac. Small family forest owners would therefore be
economically disadvantaged by a high discount rate applied to their sequestered
carbon. The discount could be reduced by estimating the error for the forests
comprising the pooled aggregate traded on the Exchange, rather than the
individual forests. The discount might also be reduced by bootstrap
computations to improve the precision of biomass estimates at almost no
additional cost. 20-basal area factor plots appear to be the most cost-efficient
and accurate design to inventory small family forests. The Missouri
Department of Conservation’s inventory software does not permit calculation of
plot-level statistics, as required by CCX rules.
Forest
Sample Size Requirements White Paper
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