Page 23 - Georgia Forestry - Issue 2 - Spring 2022

Christine Cadigan, the senior director of the Family Forest Carbon Program with the American Forest Foundation, spoke at the Georgia Forestry Association’s Landowner Summit in December about positioning private lands and family lands as a solution to climate change challenges. She explained the partnership between the American Forest Foundation and The Nature Conservancy for small family landowners. This article is condensed and edited from Cadigan’s presentation.
What is the program?
Our program is designed based on family forest owners implementing forest management practices that have quantifiable carbon benefit above what’s already business as usual. You follow a specific silvicultural prescription, and you receive an incentive payment associated with the cost of implementing that practice. We engage these landowners to enroll in our program by providing them access to technical assistance. So we actually send boots-on-the-ground foresters to talk through the eligibility criteria for various landowners. And we provide forest management plans through the enrollment process as well. Of the landowners we’ve enrolled, nearly two-thirds had never met with a forester. So we are introducing landowners to forest management.
How much land? For how long?
Our average parcel size is 140 acres. So we are validating the hypothesis that we can build a program that works for small family landowners. We have landown- ers enrolled with as little as 30 acres. Right now the minimum is 30 acres and the maximum is 2,400 contiguous acres. We’ve just set that cap so that we can focus ourselves on serving the smallest landowners.
We know that contract lengths are important for small landowners. So we’ve shortened these contracts as much as possible. Depending on the practice, we have 10- or 20-year con- tracts available for landowners. We’re still guaranteeing our carbon benefit for 100 years. We just do that by building in permanent strategies in other ways beyond contract length.
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Family- wned Forests Are Key
Local 2%
State 9%
Federal 31%
FAMILY 38%
Corporate 20%
Families and individuals own the largest of U.S. forests
More than the federal government or corpora
This ownership group is vital for achieving meaningful conserva impact at scale