One possible solution for Georgia's ailing forestry industry? Carbon credits

When you cut a whole tree trunk down into the neat two-by-fours and one-by-sixes sold at a lumber yard, a lot of wood chips, bark, and sawdust are left over. That typically gets turned into paper products. But now, the mills are closing.

“I’ve been in this business for 30 years and I’ve never experienced anything close to what we’ve experienced in the last two years,” said Zachary Johnson, a buyer for a timber company and former president of the Georgia Forestry Association. “It’s just — everyone’s scrambling.”

Timber prices have been low for a long time. They never really recovered from the 2008 housing crash. Now, nearly a dozen paper mills have closed across the South in recent years, and Hurricane Helene tore down trees in much of Georgia and the Carolinas. It’s left many in Georgia, the country’s leading state for forestry, with a dilemma: What do you do when your income relies on a forest, but nobody wants to buy your trees?

A group of researchers and industry leaders thinks paying landowners for carbon storage could help.

Forest landowners are weighing whether they can afford to keep growing, especially with housing and solar developers knocking on their doors, eager to buy up and clear their land.

“We may see a decline in the number of acres that are kept in forests and the quality of the land that is forested,” said David Eady at Georgia Tech’s business school.

Losing forests wouldn’t just shrink an industry. It would be devastating for the environment. Georgia has cut its carbon dioxide emissions by about a third since 2005, and forests are doing a lot of the work. Georgia Tech researchers credit forests with storing around 27% of the state’s emissions. So Eady, Johnson, and other experts started asking: Why not use all that carbon storage to keep foresters in business?

“We want to be the bridge, kind of like a bridge between those Georgia based-companies who want to buy good-quality forest carbon and small landowners who want to sell carbon to get additional income from their forest land,” said Yanshu Li, a professor at the University of Georgia’s forestry school.

Li and a team of others are working to develop a local carbon market. Landowners would take steps to increase or maintain the amount of carbon dioxide their forests store, like replanting instead of selling to developers, or switching to carbon-friendly harvest methods. Then Georgia companies would buy carbon credits from the foresters to offset their own emissions.

But that term Li used — “good quality” — is key. Because carbon credits are at something of a turning point, too. A recent report by the Clean Air Task Force found that most forest carbon offset programs fall short. They often don’t account for change to carbon storage over time, or overestimate how much storage a forest project really adds.

“A carbon offset is basically a license to continue polluting,” said Kathy Fallon, the CATF’s land systems program director. “It’s critical that the credits deliver an equivalent emissions reduction benefit. Otherwise, we’re both delaying real emissions reduction and potentially doing more harm than good to the atmosphere.”

The forest carbon industry has gone through a reckoning in recent years, as participants and outside advocates like Fallon try to ensure carbon credits aren’t just greenwashing. The forest carbon team in Georgia says that’s their goal too: not just preserving the current forests, but making sure they store even more carbon in the future.