When you set foot in the forests of the Issaquah Alps, you find yourself in a sea of carbon. Douglas firs, cedars, and hemlocks reach their branches to the sky, taking in carbon dioxide and sequestering the carbon in their wood. The forests of the Pacific Northwest are some of the most carbon-dense in the world - they store more carbon per acre than even the Amazon rainforest!

Now, the Washington State Department of Natural Resources (DNR) is looking to protect some of their trust lands that contain older trees by placing a commercial value on the carbon that these trees store. Earlier this year the head of the DNR, Public Lands Commissioner Hilary Franz announced the creation of a 10,000-acre “carbon reserve,” where the trees will be taken out of logging rotation, and instead left standing with their locked up carbon.

A NEw Direction For the DNR

As a state agency, the DNR is required by law to generate revenue from its trust lands for so-called “junior taxing districts,” which include school districts, hospital districts, library districts, and fire districts. Traditionally, this has been through logging - revenues from logging are a key part of the budget for many school districts, particularly in more rural areas of the state.

Historically, when trust land has been placed into conservation status, it has no longer been able to generate revenue. However, with the new carbon program, these lands are conserved - the trees won’t be cut down - but revenue is still able to be generated through the sale of carbon credits. The revenue generated might not be as much as could have been generated through logging, but it’s a more consistent revenue stream (a smaller amount every year for a few decades), rather than a one-time lump sum when the land is logged every few decades.

Carbon Credits

A carbon credit is equal to one metric ton of carbon dioxide. To determine the amount of carbon credits available on a given plot of land, surveyors go out, measure a statistically representative sample of trees, determine the estimated volume of wood in the trees, and then determine the amount of carbon in the trees.

The DNR is partnering with Finite Carbon to determine the amount of carbon credits available on these lands, and to sell these carbon to organizations and businesses looking to offset their carbon emissions. One such business is Microsoft, who has purchased over 1 million carbon credits to help offset emissions from its operations.

While the revenue that carbon credits generate and the resulting conservation should be celebrated in and of themselves, it is very important to avoid “greenwashing”, where the act of buying carbon credits isn’t paired with actual greenhouse gas emission reductions. Businesses that purchase carbon credits should do so only as a last resort; the first step should always be to reduce their emissions wherever possible. King County is working on developing standards for the purchasers of their carbon offsets to, among other things, require that any businesses or organizations that purchase carbon credits from them have a climate action plan, and are implementing strategies to reduce their emissions. The Issaquah Alps Trails Club wants the DNR to adopt similar standards.

Carbon Reserve Parcels

The parcels proposed for the carbon reserve are selected based on the DNR’s High Conservation Value (HCV) criteria, which include the following:

Significant concentrations of biodiversity;
Significant landscape-scale ecosystems;
Rare, threatened or endangered ecosystems and habitats;
Basic ecosystem services in critical situations (e.g. watershed protection, erosion control);
Areas or resources fundamental to meeting basic needs of Indigenous populations and local communities (e.g. subsistence); and
Areas or resources critical to Indigenous populations and local communities’ traditional cultural identity.

Parcels totaling 2,500 acres have already been selected for Phase 1 of the carbon reserve program. Phase 2 will identify 7,500 acres to be added to the carbon reserve. Several parcels in the Issaquah Alps, including one on Tiger Mountain called “Soderman Slope,” are being considered for inclusion in Phase 2 of the DNR’s Forest Carbon Reserve program. The map shows the location of the proposed forest carbon parcels in King County.

You can check out the maps for forest carbon parcels in other Western Washington counties on DNR’s website.