The sound of leaves crunching underfoot follows Cakey Worthington as she makes her way into a forest of pine and oak trees in the Atchafalaya Swamp. She stops at a rebar marker placed in the ground then walks up to a tree nearby.
“We come back every five years to remeasure all the trees in this location,” she said, cicadas singing nearby.
Worthington is the vice president of carbon management for Aurora Sustainable Lands, a timber company that spends more time conserving trees than chopping them down. The company now owns about 100,000 acres of land in the Atchafalaya Basin.
Instead of harvesting the trees on its land, Aurora plans to sell other companies the planet-warming gas stored inside them: carbon dioxide.
As more corporations pledge to lower their own contribution to climate change, companies like Aurora offer the businesses a way to offset their greenhouse gas emissions. Trees absorb the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere naturally, releasing the oxygen while keeping the carbon trapped within its wood. Companies then pay Aurora for the stored carbon, buying what’s called carbon credits. Aurora sold more than $100 million worth of carbon credits by the end of 2023.
The system is called carbon trading. It’s built on the belief that the carbon accumulating in the trees cancels out some of the emissions released into the atmosphere by their factories or supply chains. It’s like paying someone else to use less water so you can continue to take long showers during a water shortage.
Globally, the industry has taken off over the past 20 years. But in the South, the carbon credit industry is still nascent, just beginning to pick up steam. Aurora is one of just a few companies that are starting to sell credits derived from Louisiana trees.
Back in the forest, Worthington pulls out a tape measurer. She wraps the white tape around the tree, pulling it taught.
“We look around the side, make sure there's not any bumps or lumps or anything,” she explains. “We pull the tape tight. We measure conservatively. ”
This particular tree has grown just over an inch in two years.
“It's getting bigger, it's a nice straight tree,” Worthington said. “It has a lot of timber value for us and also stores a lot of carbon.”
To estimate the amount of carbon stored on Aurora’s land, foresters measure a sample of trees across 280 sites on the property. The company then extrapolates how many carbon credits it can sell based on the growth and loss observed on those small sample sites.
The Aurora plan also revolves around improving the management of the forests. If trees face the threat of deforestation, a carbon credit company can claim the trees wouldn’t exist if not for the company’s management. Much of Aurora’s land was bought from a traditional timber company, for example. The company can then sell even more carbon stored in the trees by comparing it to a kind of alternate reality— also known as a counterfactual scenario—formed through projections. The company didn’t share how it designs its carbon credit program.
“The market for forest carbon is definitely robust. It's been around for, over a decade at this point in its sort of modern form, which means that our quantification methods are really reliable,” Worthington said. “There’s no one solution that can address the climate and the challenges we face.”
This process can leave room for uncertainty. Worthington said Aurora is committed to ensuring the credits it sells isn’t overinflated. Researchers scrutinizing scrutinized the industry say that would be a rare exception.
Barbara Haya leads the University of Berkley’s Carbon Trading Project and has studied the industry for two decades. She said carbon credits have largely gone unregulated, run mostly by private entities, creating a “race to the bottom” that renders the credits sold meaningless.
“What we see is that across all major offset programs, there's significant over-crediting,” Haya said. “It's sort of a chronic problem in the offset industry.”
Recent studies and investigations, including one by the Guardian, have found that the vast majority of carbon credits sold in the U.S. to date do not represent real emissions reductions. Haya noted the only real way to limit climate change is to make steep emissions reductions.
She challenges the very foundation that the industry is built on, calling the phrase “carbon offsets” a “misnomer.” She said once the greenhouse gas emissions enter the atmosphere, the damage is done.
“You can’t undo that,” she said. “You've used up that limited capacity of the atmosphere.”
To meaningfully address climate change, she advises people to focus on reducing their personal greenhouse gas emissions instead of investing in offsets.
“We don't have time to keep emitting,” Haya said. “We're in a climate emergency, and we need to be reducing our emissions as quickly as we possibly can.”
While the credibility of carbon credits stands on shaky ground, projects like Aurora’s are preserving trees.
Louisiana Forestry Association Director Buck Vandersteen said the carbon credit industry gives landowners the option to keep their forests standing instead of selling the property to developers that would cut the trees down.
“The more incentive you can give the person to keep their land and forest growing trees, the, the better it is,” he said.
Vandersteen said he’s helped another company, NativState, work with private landowners in northeast Louisiana to sell the carbon accumulated in their forests. The company now manages 21,000 acres and has sold more than 2.4 million credits.
He said while the industry is growing in Louisiana, he expects the conventional timber industry to maintain its strong position in the state. In other parts of the country, timber companies have opposed conserving trees for carbon credits because it can squeeze them out of local forests closest to mills. Driving farther out to forests adds to cost and emissions.
“It'll find its balance,” Vandersteen said. “I think people are worried that all land will be tied up, and no one can cut a stick of trees. I don't think that will ever happen.”
In the Atchafalaya Swamp, Worthington said the company treats its forests holistically. They manage it for carbon, harvest select trees and ensure a diverse mix of species thrive in the habitat. The company has partnered with the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries to monitor the state’s black bears. It also provides hunters with recreational access to the land to keep the deer population in check.
“We've got families who have been recreating here for generations that lease access to the land,” Worthington said. “In the off season, a lot of times those groups will come out just to enjoy the property.”
