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From left: Matthew Niese, David Niese, David Funk and Christopher Holliday. Credit: Courtesy of David Funk<\/p>\nDavid Funk has spent decades working to restore the native forest ecosystems of southeast Ohio. Now, he\u2019s finally getting paid for it\u2014through a carbon credit program.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe Nature Conservancy reached out and knew that I was very active in the preservation of woodlands in southeastern Ohio,\u201d Funk said. \u201cIt was just a perfect fit for what we do.\u201d<\/p>\n
Funk runs Capstone Property Management, a nonprofit based in Athens County, Ohio. The organization is best known locally as a rental property manager, but woodland preservation is also part of its DNA. According to its website, Capstone owns and manages 3,600 acres of forest.<\/p>\n
From left: Matthew Niese, David Niese, David Funk and Christopher Holliday. Credit: Courtesy of David Funk<\/p>\n
That\u2019s why Funk was eager to become the first Ohio member of the Family Forest Carbon Program. An initiative of the American Forest Foundation and the Nature Conservancy, the FFCP pays private landowners not to timber the forests on their properties for 20 years. It also provides free consultations with forest managers to facilitate whatever goals landowners may have for their woods\u2014hunting, hiking, even sustainable harvesting.<\/p>\n
To pay for it all, the program sells carbon credits to companies looking to offset their greenhouse gas emissions. By preventing large-scale timber harvests, trees continue to absorb more carbon. When companies buy a credit, they are essentially paying a cohort of landowners not to clear cut.<\/p>\n
The landowner gets money. The forest is healthier. Companies offset their emissions. On paper, everyone wins.<\/p>\n
The reality is not so clear. Carbon credit programs in general have faced withering criticism from scientists who argue that many are fatally flawed. The American Forest Foundation has taken great pains to address those worries, but not everyone is convinced. In fact, the very presence in the program of someone like Funk\u2014a man who is devoted to local forest ecosystems and deeply concerned about climate change\u2014may play into their concerns.<\/p>\n
At the same time, the program\u2019s own monitoring suggests its approach is working: On average, its forests are growing more and better than those not enrolled.<\/p>\n
How It Works<\/p>\n
The FFCP operates in 19 states, from Minnesota to Maine to Alabama. To participate, landowners must own at least 30 acres of forest with at least 4,000 board feet per acre. They sign a contract promising not to remove more than 25 percent of their timber stocking over 20 years.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cIt guides you away from a high grade approach or a clear cut approach and to the sort of tending approach,\u201d said Richard Campbell, director of science and product refinement at the American Forest Foundation. \u201cTending,\u201d he said, includes \u201cthings like a forest thinning, where you remove the less healthy, less valuable trees and promote growth on larger, more valuable trees that will live for longer.\u201d<\/p>\n
According to Campbell, landowners can remove 5 percent of their stock every 5 years and still end up with more trees than when they started.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s not a theory. These are well-proven examples. You can see it in the rapid-growing forests in the Pacific Northwest. You can see it to some degree in the Northeast \u2026 A really good example is in Central Europe, in Germany, where they\u2019ve been managing some timber stands for two [hundred] or three hundred years,\u201d Campbell said.<\/p>\n
Enrolled landowners get paid for each acre they own. In Central Appalachia, they earn a total of $230 per acre over the span of their 20-year enrollment.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis is typically not life-changing money to these landowners, but it seems to correlate pretty closely with property tax, at least throughout most of the program,\u201d said American Forest Foundation outreach forester Tristan Kinnison.<\/p>\n
The FFCP also provides the landowner with an optional forest management plan. Funk, who has been trying to restore southeast Ohio\u2019s native oak and hickory forests since the 1980s, said this has been invaluable.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe need to be very careful that it\u2019s not that passive activity,\u201d Funk said. \u201cIf you let woods go, you may end up with an autumn olive<\/a> plantation \u2026 invasive species that are terrible for the environment.\u201d<\/p>\n Funk said he is committed to doing this work with or without the FFCP. Still, he said it\u2019s no question the money and management expertise have helped him and his team at Capstone accomplish much more than they would have otherwise.<\/p>\n A Problem of Addition<\/p>\n A carbon credit is essentially a promise: Pay this money and keep a ton of carbon out of the atmosphere. It\u2019s generally understood there should be some additional carbon removed from the atmosphere because of that credit, and only because of it. This is known as \u201cadditionality.\u201d<\/p>\n Studies have shown that a vast number of carbon credit programs have failed to deliver on that promise. A 2024 meta-analysis<\/a> published in Nature found only 25 percent of those based on avoiding deforestation yielded emissions reductions, while those based on improved forest management yielded no statistically significant reductions at all.<\/p>\n This story is funded by readers like you.<\/p>\n Our nonprofit newsroom provides award-winning climate coverage free of charge and advertising. We rely on donations from readers like you to keep going. Please donate now to support our work.<\/p>\n Donate Now<\/a> <\/p>\n Benedict Probst is a research leader at the Net Zero Lab at the Max Planck Institute for Innovation and Competition in Munich, and one of the authors of the 2024 study. He explained how a carbon credit program might fail on additionality<\/p>\n \u201cA typical example is wind power in China. Under the Clean Development Mechanism [a carbon offset program of the Kyoto Protocol], a lot of project developers said, \u2018You know, we can\u2019t build this wind farm if we don\u2019t get this additional funding through carbon credits,\u2019\u201d Probst said.\u00a0<\/p>\n Credits were then sold based on how many fossil fuels the wind farms would replace. Buy a credit, be the reason a certain amount of oil, gas and coal doesn\u2019t get burned.<\/p>\n The problem, Probst said, is that \u201cstudies later showed that there were a bunch of projects that didn\u2019t get carbon credits, but were built in similar regions.\u201d In other words, those credits probably weren\u2019t decisive in making those wind projects happen. There was no additionality.<\/p>\n Low-quality credits effectively allow companies to continue emitting more than they should, and Probst said they have other knock-on effects, as well. He co-authored a recent essay in Nature arguing such credits are flooding the voluntary carbon market, depressing carbon prices and pushing the Paris climate goals farther out of reach.\u00a0<\/p>\n The challenge is also significant for forestry-based credits.<\/p>\n \u201cLet\u2019s say you want to protect some forests. You need to understand what would have happened without that protection. But this \u2026 is unobservable,\u201d Probst said.<\/p>\n To get around this, forestry-based programs often resort to complex, individualized models that simulate how their forests will grow in the future. They then award credits based on the projections. This \u201cex-ante\u201d approach is often unreliable, according to a recently published essay in Global Change Biology<\/a> which Probst co-authored.<\/p>\n The paper states that ex-post approaches\u2014which award credits based on real observations, not simulations\u2014can be more reliable, if the data is good enough. However, \u201cthere is currently no single ex-post method that should be regarded as the definitive solution,\u201d the authors wrote.<\/p>\n The FFCP does use an ex-post approach. First, it groups properties like Funk\u2019s into a cohort. Over the next 20 years, it compares growth in this cohort to a control group from the Forest Inventory and Analysis program<\/a> of the U.S. Forest Service.<\/p>\n \u201cWe match for ownership type, we match for eco region, species mix, timber stocking, regeneration class\u2014all of the different things to basically try to \u2026 control for every other variable,\u201d Campbell explained. \u201cWe look at \u2026 the growing difference between those two sets of data\u2014not the initial stocking, but only the change over time as it occurs. And since we\u2019ve controlled for everything but membership in the program, we can attribute that change in stocking to the program, and then we can quantify that, and then we can turn that into carbon credits.\u201d<\/p>\n In short: cohort\u2019s carbon, minus the control group\u2019s carbon, equals carbon credits.<\/p>\n Brent Sohngen, a professor of environmental and resource economics at the Ohio State University, said he believes the FFCP\u2019s approach to calculating additionality is \u201cstate of the art.\u201d<\/p>\n They\u2019re \u201cusing really good data to try to sort of identify what and where landowners can achieve additional carbon,\u201d Sohngen said. \u201cIt seems pretty solid.\u201d<\/p>\n But not everyone shares his enthusiasm. John Sterman, a professor of system dynamics at the MIT Sloan School of Management, said he still has serious concerns.<\/p>\n![\"Trees](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/12\/OHIO-in-Field.jpg\"\/)
Trees are planted to spell \u201cOHIO\u201d in a field near Chauncey, Ohio. Credit: Courtesy of David Funk<\/p>\n