About Our Carbon Offset Program

The Nature Conservancy has begun an innovative new project in the Lower Mississippi Valley that restores critical wildlife habitat and provides an opportunity to offer our supporters the Conservancy’s first carbon offset program to reduce climate change. As funding for the program increases, the Conservancy will begin additional projects within the program.

This program has been designed and implemented by climate change experts and forest scientists with years of experience analyzing, measuring and verifying carbon sequestration projects.

You can offset your carbon footprint today.

The Conservancy is pursuing certification by Voluntary Carbon Standard (VCS) for carbon storage in the projects and designed the projects to meet standards set out by the Climate, Community, and Biodiversity Alliance (CCB).

Meeting the Highest Standards

The Conservancy’s carbon offset program addresses the major scientific concerns surrounding carbon sequestration projects in the following ways:

• Our Approach — which hinges on bringing lands into protected status and restoring those lands — serves to guarantee that the generation and continued storage of forest carbon can be attributed to the participants' contributions.


• Leakage: The Conservancy will discount carbon sequestered from offset projects from the outset in order to account for leakage that may occur. This is in accordance with standards set by VCS.


• Permanence: The Conservancy will maintain a permanent easement on the project ensuring it will remain forested for future generations. In addition, offsets are being placed into a reserve to account for any natural damage that could occur to the project, such as damage from storms.


• Standards of Verification: Staff will measure carbon storage for every project within the carbon offset program for its expected carbon sequestration performance goals, and those measurements will be verified once every five years. Participants in the carbon offset program will receive regular reports from this testing — as well as any other news regarding the program — as it is warranted.

When you make a contribution to the Conservancy's carbon offset program, your money will be used to protect land, plant trees and measure and verify the amount of carbon that they sequester over the next 70 years, when the forest will have matured.

If you have any additional questions, concerns, or comments about the standards used in the offset program, please don’t hesitate to contact us and tell us what you think about climate change, forest carbon projects, and the carbon market.