. SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT . .
An article from Revitalization: the Journal of Urban, Rural and Enviornmental Resilience
GreenTrees® claims to be the largest reforestation program in North America, with over 120,000 acres of trees restored via its 500 landowner partners. These plantings produceg over 1,000,000 tons annually on The American Carbon Registry.
GreenTrees recently completed its latest verification for 1,273,866 metric tons on the American Carbon Registry (ACR). This marks the second consecutive issuance of over one million tons.
Photo credit: GreenTrees.
ACR has had fifteen issuances over a million forestry tons for both compliance and voluntary markets. This includes IFM, Avoided Conversion and Afforestation/Reforestation project types. Of the fifteen issuances, GreenTrees has two of them. Only three of the fifteen issuances are from afforestation/reforestation projects, with the remaining one from an international project.
The GreenTrees River System approach is setting the standard for how reforestation can achieve scale and impact and does it with small and medium-sized landowners. Reforestation provides a continuous loop of scaled impact while bending the climate curve.
On behalf of landowners—whose properties range from 7 to 1700+ acres–the company quantifies their positive impact being made in cleaning up the air, building equity in the landscape, filtering the water and enhancing wildlife habitat.
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When you cultivate plants, do you cultivate peace?
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Ultimately, reforestation is about repairing past and growing future with nature’s own solar-powered carbon sequestration technology: trees.
On April 5, 2018, GreenTrees was awarded The American Carbon Registry’s Innovation Award. The American Carbon Registry (ACR) is a nonprofit enterprise of Winrock International.
GreenTrees received ACR’s Innovation award in recognition of exceptional implementation of the world’s largest reforestation project both in terms of volume of high-quality verified emissions reductions issued and number of participating landowners and acres. The GreenTrees project is a one-million-acre conservation initiative that aims to plant over 500 million new trees for ecosystem repair and climate impact in the Mississippi Alluvial Valley, North America’s largest rainforest and waterfowl migratory corridor.
By partnering with close to 500 landowners on over 120,000 acres to date to reforest their degraded lands, GreenTrees has enhanced wildlife habitat, improved water and soil quality and delivered local economic development benefits in addition to generating over 2.5 million tonnes of verified carbon offsets for partners including Norfolk Southern, Duke Energy, United Airlines, Arbor Day Foundation, Blue Mountain Brewery and Skyway Air Taxi, among others.
“We highly value this award and thank the American Carbon Registry for its keen understanding of research and market-based programs, our corporate clients and carbon buyers for endorsing our work, our conservation community friends for their wonderful counsel over the years, and our landowners as partners. Their stake as equity brokers with us is the chief factor creating the prairie fire of steadily expanding healthy forest ecosystems, which is the leading reforestation co-benefit for our time,” said Jerry Van Voorhis, president and chief executive officer of GreenTrees.
“We believe that ecosystem change in forestry alone will help bend the climate curve back most, replenish our earth, and let the tools of capitalism work for the greater good of the planet,” he concluded.
(Thank you to Janet Hudgins, the CPNN reporter for this article.)