Carbon Credit Contract Lengths

Here I explore contract lengths that are used for forest carbon offsets. Most existing frameworks don't make sense.
100 year long contracts are not desirable for landowners and lead to questionable projects, since the only people signing those contracts are people who wouldn't have otherwise cut the trees.
Short contracts only make sense if they extend beyond the biological rotation age of the forest. If it takes 50 years for trees to grow for timber, then it makes no sense to create a 30 year project on a 20 year old timber plantation. You've just paid for nothing.
The best solution is to make contracts variable, extending beyond the biological rotation age of the forest. A 10 year project may not sound like much, but it's doing a lot more good protecting a mature at-risk forest than a 100 year project protecting a park.
Tonne year accounting can and should then be used to set projects of different contract lengths equal to a 100 + year standard.

[@MBoriawala]

Very Informative Videos! Keep up the good work.

[@LukeSchubert-je7hu]

Fantastic breakdown!

[@Crewboy17]

Hey Elias, thanks for the video. Curious to know your take on the following: I can understand the benefit of protecting a 50 y.o. doug fir stand for 10 more years if the alternative is deforestation and land use conversion--I don't think there's any question there--but if the land's going to go back into working forest, from a carbon sequestration perspective, wouldn't it make more sense to harvest, lock up that carbon in long-lived wood products, then reestablish that forest to capture more carbon more quickly by taking advantage of the high growth rate of young stands before MAI plateaus off? Thanks!

[@SamJewel]

why not measure yearly. pay yearly incentivise yearly!

[@eliasayrey5188]

Well, we should definitely be paying people every year in all projects.
But beyond a single year we need to make sure the commitment to conservation/restoration lasts beyond the period that wouldn't have happened. You probably wouldn't want Weyerhauser (the biggest US timber company) to clear cut a forest, then to earn credits for each year that it regrows until they clear cut it the next time. We need to make sure that if they're going to get credits, they commit to protecting the forest for longer than they otherwise would have let it grown.