- Welcome.

Welcome to A Wild Idea: The APA and the Science Behind Carbon Credits, brought to you tonight by WSKG Public Media.

I'm Nancy Coddington, director of science content at WSKG.

Please take a moment and introduce yourself in the chat and tell us where you're tuning in from.

We have people joining us from all across the country, and we love to know where you're from.

Please also use the Q & A features tonight to ask questions of our guests.

We will be working those in and getting them answered for you during our presentation tonight.

I would like to introduce our moderator, Brad Edmondson.

He is the author of "A Wild Idea: How Environmental Movement Tamed the Adirondacks."

He's the former president of the Finger Lakes Land Trust, and he's current president of the Cornell Daily Sun.

Welcome, Brad.

- Thanks Nancy.

And I'm really glad to be here tonight.

We're gonna be talking about the Adirondack State Park, and you might wonder why we're gonna be spending more than an hour talking about one state park.

And the reason is that the Adirondack State Park is quite big.

It's as big as the state of Vermont.

And most of the land is privately owned.

The Adirondack Park is also within a day's drive of 85 million people.

And yet, it seems almost completely undeveloped.

And I wanted to know how that happened.

So I went on a journey to write a book and make a movie.

And what I found was that for the last 50 years, the wide-open spaces of the Adirondacks have been protected by a state law that restricts development on all 6 million acres.

The law was revolutionary because it was one of the first large-scale attempts at sustainable development.

And the law was also extremely controversial, but even its critics now admit, 50 years after it was passed, that it's working.

The Adirondack Park has been struggling for 50 years to find ways for people and nature to thrive together.

And today, the world is paying more attention to the Adirondacks because of the urgent challenges of climate change.

The survival of our species now depends on the exact same goal.

Everyone on Earth has to find ways for people and nature to thrive together.

The Adirondack Land Use Plan was revolutionary because of how it used scientific data to drive decision-making about land use.

A team of planners and ecologists spent five years gathering facts about the land, like soil types, slopes, wildlife, and wetlands.

They gave the data to lawyers, and together these three groups decided how much development to allow on each acre of the park.

Now, this project was far more dramatic than it might sound.

And part of our documentary tells the story of how a young ecologist named George Davis led a very small group that was understaffed, underfunded, and under a great deal of time pressure.

So we're gonna watch that clip now.

- [Narrator] George Davis had 15 months to do the impossible.

He had to finish a master plan for a collection of state-owned lands that covered more acres than Yellowstone National Park.

That was the easy part.

Much harder was the master plan for the park's private land, which covered as much acreage as the state of Connecticut.

Nobody had ever done anything like that before.

The agency also had to write and enforce interim rules for all that private land, even though it didn't have any enforcement officers.

And the APA also started up during a budget crisis.

It couldn't hire a complete staff until four months before the deadline.

The law required the APA staff to release a draft of the private land use plan for public comment at the end of 1972, but time was short and the amount of work was overwhelming.

A half dozen field workers had to collect and check data on soils, slopes, plants, wildlife, and scenic vistas for three and a half million acres of land, turn the data into a ranking system, and put the results on maps.

The system overlaid base maps with sheets of clear plastic film called Mylar, and they indicated each site's limitations by applying a clingy plastic film screen called Zip-A-Tone.

One layer of Zip-A-Tone meant proceed with caution.

Four layers meant no buildings allowed ever.

- And so, for example, areas with steep slopes should generally have less development on them than areas that are gentle.

Areas with very shallow soils, where bedrock is very close to the surface, and therefore you don't have drainage for septic systems, etc.

Areas that have important wildlife resources, wetlands, stream corridors.

And so, what the agency staff did was to build a series of overlay maps to reflect these different limitations on development.

- Oh dear.

So many nights I'd get ready for bed and find Zip-A-Tone in my underwear (laughs).

God, it was everywhere 'cause it sticks to everything.

- So the guy who had Zip-A-Tone in his underwear was George Davis, who I interviewed in 2003.

The person who spoke before him is Richard Booth, Richard Booth was a young lawyer at the APA in 1972.

And he's now a planning professor at Cornell University.

And Professor Booth, in the documentary, goes on to explain why their work broke new ground.

His comment is followed by a sort of thumbnail description of the private land plan.

So we're gonna continue with that clip now.

- There were lots of examples of suburban subdivision ordinances that talked about open space.

I mean, that was not an uncommon topic in local planning, but at the scale we were talking about, there really wasn't anything to look at.

Collectively, we had to kind of merge ideas that came out of local zoning, but realized it had to be operable on a much, much larger scale.

- [Narrator] The plan and the big map were finally released for public comment on December 21st, 1972.

It proposed six categories for the private land in the park.

The APA would have very little authority in existing towns and villages, but the further away you got from these settlements, the fewer buildings were allowed.

The two most restrictive categories were rural use, which allows one building on every eight and a half acres of land, and resource management, which allows one building on every 43 acres.

And the proposal put 85% of the park's private land into the two most restrictive categories.

- So the plan got pretty good reviews across New York state when it was released, but inside the park, it was kind of like throwing a lit match into a puddle of gasoline.

And that's because this plan was a huge imposition of state power onto a deeply rural area where zoning had been almost completely unknown.

So the early years of the APA were very rough going because the staff had to use techniques and standards that were almost completely new, as they were enforcing regulations that were still being revised.

But over the next several decades, the tools and techniques that scientists used to evaluate land became far more sophisticated.

And one of the most important benefits of the APA law didn't even become clear until decades after the law was passed Today, climate change has scientists measuring something that wasn't considered important 50 years ago because large forests extract vast amounts of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere as their trees grow.

How much they extract has become a very important question.

And that's what we're gonna be looking into tonight.

Foresters measure the amount of carbon dioxide absorbed by a parcel of land to produce a thing called carbon credits.

These are permits that allow a buyer to offset their carbon emissions by promising to protect an area that absorbs an equivalent amount of CO2, and big companies like Google, Delta Airlines, Disney, General Motors, and Shell Oil are buying a lot of carbon credits these days.

And the money from these credits has a new generation of land use planners thinking big.

Our first guest tonight is Mike DiNunzio, who began his career as a conservation ecologist in the Adirondacks in the 1970s, where he worked for the state in various conservation organizations over the next 40 years.

Mike is gonna tell us what the early days of science-based conservation were like.

Our second guest is Justin Miller.

He's a forester who measures carbon sequestration, and he will tell us exactly how he does that.

Our third guest is John Leibowitz, executive director of the Northeast Wilderness Trust, who will talk about how conservation organizations use the revenue they receive from selling carbon credits.

Now, Mike DiNunzio was a young man with two degrees from the State College of Environmental Science and Forestry, when he joined the staff of the Adirondack Park Agency three years after it came into existence in 1974.

Mike went on to have a long and distinguished career in conservation.

He evaluated the potential impacts of development proposals, and worked to protect wildlands over the next four decades.

He's the author of "Adirondack Wild Guide: A Natural History of the Adirondack Park".

Mike, welcome to the show.

- Nice to be with you, Brad.

- Mike, the science of evaluating wildland and the impacts of development was very different 50 years ago.

How did you get started in this business?

- Well, like everyone, I think my early days at home sort of began to clarify my career path because I really liked to walk a lot, and I liked to walk in wildlands, and the longer the walks and the wilder the lands, the better, as far as I was concerned.

Well, I ended up at the Forestry School at Syracuse, and I was a plant biochemistry major.

I loved the plant part, all the botany, I loved it.

The chemistry, not so much.

So I began to think about what I really wanted to do after graduation.

And when I was sitting on a college bus ready for a field trip one day, I looked outside the window and saw a group of students waiting for their bus, but it was unique in that surrounded a professor who, today, I think I can only describe as an Indiana Jones type character, complete with a fedora and a field satchel.

And at that time, I had an epiphany of sorts, in that I said to myself, I don't know who that guy is and I don't know what he does, but that's what I wanna do.

And I came to find out that that was Dr. Edwin Kethlich, known to generations of students as Ketch.

And I got to know him during my undergrad years, and after I completed my military obligation, I went back to grad school and I was very fortunate to be able to work as a grad student under Kethlich.

He was my major professor.

And I worked on the high peaks vegetation of the Adirondack mountains with Ketch, which was one of his special loves.

He had been with the 10th Mountain Division in the Second World War.

He always loved high places, wildlands, just like I did.

After that work, I got an offer to work for the Adirondack Park Agency as a biological analyst, and the rest is history.

- Yeah, so those old-school naturalists guys like Ketch, they were extremely charismatic people.

When I was doing my interviews for the book, I over and over again, anecdotes and fond memories of the lone figure striding through the wildland, discovering plants and animals, and writing them down in his little notebook.

But Mike, when you got to the APA, you discovered that their job wasn't exactly the same as what these old-fashioned naturalists were doing.

Can you describe the difference for us between the APA and what Ketch was doing?

- Well, it wasn't just Ketch.

In the early days of conservation in the US, the National Parks epitomized what's called the rocks and ice theory of conservation.

Mostly all, if not all federally owned lands, certainly no development, usually wild undeveloped areas.

We called it the rocks and ice theory.

It wasn't really the best land to preserve.

It wasn't the most biologically valuable.

It was what people could get.

Our national parks, in general, represent that model.

More locally, people tended to protect what I call hotspots, a grove of big trees, a wetland with special wildflowers, maybe a viewshed somewhere.

Those little hotspots really were so local and insignificant in the bigger picture that they really didn't protect the larger landscape, like the Adirondack Park Agency was challenged with doing.

So it was a new approach to conservation.

And it was really guided by a landscape architect from Pennsylvania named Ian McHarg, who developed a process in which he wrote up in a book called "Design With Nature".

And it was a resource analysis sort of layer cake approach, which you described earlier in that Mylar segment.

But we had to look at each acre of land as development proposals came in.

And so, it wasn't exact, the date of the APA had gathered was regional in scope.

And it wasn't local enough for us to work on when a project came in for permitting.

And so, we had to look at each project, and we had 37, no less than 37 development considerations to look at before the agency could make its determination.

Everything from wetlands, wildlife, even community services had to be examined.

And so, in the end we said, we can't really look at every little factor that we're supposed to look at.

We had to look at the big picture and try to place that development within the regional scope of our work.

The Park Agency, however, could not make a decision until it understood that there would be no undo adverse impacts.

And that was a very difficult decision that only the agency members could make, all 11 of them.

That was really their job, to balance all of the input on a project and decide, can this be done with no undo adverse impacts?

In the end, we always had to apply permit conditions.

I can't remember a project that was actually turned down flat out.

Most of them had many conditions so that the agency could make its proper determination.

I think that was precedent setting, and it really, really was the first in its nation regional land use planning and zoning.

- Yeah, so rather than the rocks and ice theories of park, this was a place where people and nature were to exist side by side.

And it seems like those development considerations and the idea of undue impact were sort of an unfair burden for the staff because those things weren't really spelled out very well in the law, were they?

- No, in fact that is a legal decision.

You really can't make the decision on your own.

And so, instead of going to the courts to decide on each project, you went to the agency members, and they were selected by the governor to represent various interests.

And all in all, I think it worked out well.

- Yeah, I think so too, but it got off to a pretty rocky start.

Mike, after you left the APA, you left the APA in 1977, you were hired by the Nature Conservancy to do another new thing, and that was to design a contract for a permanent conservation easement on more than 50,000 acres of private, remote, privately owned forests, farm fields, lakes, rivers, mountains, and wetlands.

Now, a conservation easement, for those viewers who don't know, is a voluntary agreement between a private landowner and a third party where the landowner sells or donates some of their property rights to that third party.

And the Nature Conservancy was working on one of the first really big conservation easement deals.

They were writing two easements in 1978, one of them on 31,800 acres, and the other on 24,700 acres of adjoining land in the northeastern part of the Adirondack Park.

Nobody had ever done anything like those Bay Pond and Brandon Park deals before.

So Mike, can you describe for us what that job was like?

That's Bay Pond and Brandon Park on the map now.

- Yes, well, this was something that had never been done before.

In fact, conservation easements were new to the field of conservation.

Well, previously, lands had been purchased, for the most part, by the state, by the federal government, or by individual organizations.

And they really were therefore limited by what they could buy to protect.

As conservation easements came into the picture, land owners could donate or sell the rights to do certain things on their land, such as subdivide and develop it.

That would therefore protect the conservation values, and it would do so in perpetuity.

So it was a legally binding agreement, which would run for all time.

And when we were faced with the job of designing an easement on no less than 50,000 contiguous acres, no one had ever done this before that we knew of, certainly the Nature Conservancy had never done it.

So we knew that we were setting another precedent, as the park had done since its formation in 1892.

The biggest park, a park that included human communities and private land.

And now, it was the park that was demonstrating a way to protect large acreages with a conservation easement.

At the time, there were only one other easement I knew of.

Today, there are about a million acres of easements in the park.

So that process was something that had to be developed, and I was hired by the Conservancy to do so with a couple of other people.

And the result then was easement formed in '78, '79 that has lasted until now.

- So you zoned this large property in different ways, depending on how much development and what kinds of activity were gonna take place on different zones within this 50,000-acre property, or these two properties that totaled 50,000 acres.

Can you give us a thumbnail sketch of how you did that and what the zones were?

- Yes, well essentially, it was a wildland easement, except that wildland easements don't allow timber harvesting.

So we said, let's not do any development, recognizing that anything that took place would still be jurisdictional with the APA.

In other words, the easement doesn't remove the requirement to get a permit, if you're gonna do something that the APA requires a permit for.

We said, let's just make it easy here.

And the owner said, well, we'd like to develop around one lake, sell a few lots, and that's it.

So we said, take that out of the easement.

Don't even put that in the easement.

Make it easy for us.

And so, we surveyed the entire 50,000-acre parcel minus a few developable lots around one lake.

And we said, within this area, no development is to take place, with the exception of maybe a minor outbuilding, a lean-to, that sort of thing.

And otherwise, you really need to get permission from the Adirondack Park Agency if you're gonna do anything on your developable parcel anyway.

And it was made a little bit easier by the fact that in the Adirondack Park, there are other various layers of protection for special places.

For example, if you want to log in the park, you're limited on the ability to clear cut.

You're also limited to what you can do in wild, scenic, and recreational river corridors, of which there were three on these lands.

You're also limited in work you can do in wetlands or near wildlife areas, like a winter deer yard.

So we were actually, our job was made a little bit easier by the fact that we were in the park and there were sorts of protections over the land, even though the owners had given up development rights.

So we decided the real impact then, would be from timber harvesting.

And like any forester will tell you, the first thing a landowner should do is to hire a forester and have a timber management plan made up.

So we made that a requirement, and the management plan had to be okayed by the Nature Conservancy.

And we also said, you've got to set back.

We had wide corridors along rivers.

We had setbacks from wetlands, setbacks from wildlife areas.

And so, the plan itself dealt with forestry, but we left them quite a bit of leeway because remember, an easement runs forever.

And the management on those lands had been done very well for a long time.

And we didn't wanna restrict unnecessarily things that, in the future, might be done.

So we required a master plan and an approvable plan by a forester.

And I think it worked out well.

- Yeah, I think it did too.

And Mike, thank you very much, Mike.

We're gonna move on now, but I really appreciate you bringing us back to that time and telling us just how you had to kind of do the best you could with very little limited information.

And we dwelled on conservation easements because since the time that Mike worked on conservation easements, they've become a major tool in land protection.

The laws were cleared up in 1983, which made easements a whole lot easier to do legally in New York.

And today, as Mike said, the state DEC owns nearly a million acres of conservation easements on private land.

And 3/4 of that million acres are in the Adirondack Park.

And nationally, land trusts own conservation easements on 32.7 million acres of private land.

There's a conservation easement database linked in the, elsewhere on the page for this show where you can find easements near you.

And that 32.7 million acres is more territory than the state of Pennsylvania.

So now, we're gonna talk about where this field is today.

And particularly, in the last few years, when sort of a new front has opened up in the land protection movement, and these are carbon credits.

They show that you've protected an amount of land equal to the amount of carbon dioxide that your activities put into the atmosphere.

The global value of carbon dioxide permits was more than $850 billion last year.

Most of that activity happened in Europe.

In the United States, carbon credits are very lightly regulated, and they still seem kind of exotic, but when they're adopted more widely here, the market is going to get much, much bigger.

So how do carbon credits actually work?

Our second guest, Justin Miller, owns Green Timber Consulting Foresters in Michigan's Upper Peninsula, another region that has a lot of big working forest.

Justin is here to sort of walk us through a carbon survey.

So Justin, welcome to the show, and tell us, when you need to measure the amount of carbon in a forest, how do you do it?

- Yeah, thanks for having me, Brad.

So not unlike other projects we've been talking about yet here this evening, it's a complex process.

I thought I would just kind of boil it down and give you the general outline of how this works.

So similar to the APA and how it got started, there's a lot of mapping involved.

So we start with GIS.

Today, we're using GIS.

And really, with the carbon projects, we're setting out to identify the forested acreage within a perspective property.

And in GIS, we're carving those areas out.

We're identifying those acres that are forested, 'cause that's what we're interested in.

And once we have that forested acreage, we've got ourselves a project area.

And then within that project area, we've gotta design a fairly intensive, complex inventory where we go and collect data to then help us best understand what volume is in that particular property where the carbon project would exist.

And so, within that inventory, we've got sample plots kind of put, every project is designed differently, but there would be sample plots throughout the entire project area.

And then we go out and measure woody material, live trees, standing dead trees.

We need data on those trees to then help quantify that carbon within that project area.

So when we're on site, we're just using regular diameter tapes to measure diameters of trees.

We need to know the species.

We need to know tree heights.

I've got a, this is a criterion that we use, and it's kind of a modern tool that we use to, if we can't physically measure a point on a tree and we need to know the diameter at a particular height, we'll use that tool to identify a spot on a tree and its diameter.

Then also too, as we're looking at our sample trees, we're looking for broken tops, any missing volume that would normally be there.

So maybe there's a tree cavity or a hole, so those deductions are brought into our calculations.

And then also, in the forest, we're taking other measurements.

So I've got a increment borer here.

So we use these increment borers to bore into a tree, and then extract a core from that tree without needing to cut the tree down.

And then, we'll analyze those cores to get tree age, tree productivity, and then that information's then used to help model that forest over time.

To give you an idea of what one tree might look like in terms of carbon stored in it.

If we have an eight-inch red oak, so that'd be a little bit larger than a coffee can, 60 feet high, we calculate that tree to have stored about 1,000 pounds of carbon.

Now, that tree is sequestering carbon over time.

So it's storing it away.

And that particular tree we estimate to store about three pounds per year.

So with all these tree measurements we're making on those sample plots, we add all that up and we use, so we add up all that information.

And then we quantify it using species specific coefficients that are scientifically vetted to then quantify how much volume would be on each plot.

And then those plots are pulled together through the inventory, and then extrapolated across the entire project area, and then modeled forward to understand how much carbon is sequestered in that project area over a course of time or in a year.

- So it sounds like foresters need to be very good at math now?

- You know, that's interesting.

I was talking with another carbon forester and he asked, we were talking about, well, what do you say when somebody asks you what you do?

And it was an interesting answer that he said.

He said, "I said, we just do a lot of math."

I'd never really thought about it that way, but yes, there is a lot of math and statistics involved in forestry, and particular, in these carbon projects.

- Yeah, really interesting.

So you've taken us now to the point where you've estimated the number of tons of carbon that are above and below the ground stored by woody material in a given area.

Is that number of tons of carbon the same thing as a carbon credit?

- So, yeah, that's a good question.

And the short answer is, no.

So you're right.

We need to know how much volume of carbon is on that, within that project area that we've identified, but to arrive at carbon credit, to arrive at a carbon credit, there's a process that's followed.

So we take that project area or that property, and we look at that total volume that we've quantified from that inventory.

And then we have to look at it two different ways.

How's that volume going to look over time with that project in place versus how that volume might look with no carbon project on the property.

So the idea is, with the project, your volume would be here.

Without the project, the volume could be here.

And that difference between the two, that delta is called additionality.

And so, that additionality eventually then turns into carbon credits, but there's a process yet that, once you identify that additionality, there's a process that you need to follow to get down to the carbon credits.

So first, there's some deductions that need to happen.

There's an uncertainty deduction where that's really, it's based on the inventory that I described earlier.

So it's a kind of a statistical measurement, how confident or how certain or how uncertain are we on those measurements?

And so, there's a small deduction that would potentially have to happen with that uncertainty deduction.

Then there's a thing called leakage.

And so, that's a concept where, if a particular property has a carbon project on it and harvest activity is reduced because the property has a carbon project on it, but that harvest activity is shifted to different property, that's called leakage.

And so, there's a deduction that's taken to help account for that potential.

- I see.

- Then there's also a buffer pool, which serves as a insurance mechanism, where should there be a reversal on the property during the contract or the commitment period of the carbon project, maybe there's a wildfire that takes place, that buffer pool would help account for that volume loss.

- Well, thanks.

- Once we have all these calculations, all these documents in place, we hand this off to a third-party auditor, and the project goes through a very rigorous audit process where all of our steps are checked against protocols that are followed for the particular program that the project is in.

And once that audit is successful, then that volume can then be converted from tons of carbon to credits, which the landowners could sell.

- Just one more, so additionality is a really key term, and it's a lot more complicated than you might initially think.

But just one more thing about your process.

Another term besides additionality that's really important here is permanence.

In your field, can you explain what permanence means?

- Yeah, so yeah, permanence is important.

And so, that refers to how long that carbon would be stored in the forest.

And so, the longer the carbon project commitment period, or length of time that that property would be protected under the carbon project, there'd be more permanence.

So to give you an idea of how long these projects and their commitment periods last, anywhere from, say, 40 years to 125 years would be that commitment period.

- Wow, hmm.

And the last question for you, Justin, who are your clients?

I mean, how has the carbon surveying business changed over the last few years?

- Yeah, so we've been working in the carbon space since 2009.

And so, we've seen this evolve.

And in that time, we worked for land owners of all classifications, except for the federal government.

I've not seen a carbon program, carbon project program that allows for federal land.

But yeah, we've seen this activity really grow in the last two years, but yeah, we've watched it evolve.

And in most of the programs we've worked in, there's a lot of synergies between sustainable forest management and the carbon program.

So it's very attractive to a lot of forest landowners.

- Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, that figure that I quoted earlier, $850 billion in 2021, that was almost double the amount of the value of carbon dioxide permits in 2020.

And the main reason was that between those two years, the European Union adopted uniform regulations for carbon permits and made them much easier to trade in Europe.

And when that happened, when the market was standardized and there were uniform rules everywhere, the market really took off.

Thanks very much, Justin.

That was really, really interesting.

Our third guest tonight is John Liebowitz, who's executive director of the Northeast Wilderness Trust.

And the Northeast Wilderness Trust is a land trust.

It protects 65,000 acres of wildland in New York and New England.

And it supports a goal that is often referred to as rewilding.

Rewilding means protecting forests so they can mature into the climax stage or the old-growth stage of a forest.

And the Northeast Wilderness Trust has a program called Wild Carbon that uses carbon credits to help finance land deals.

So John, welcome to the show, and tell us, please, how are carbon credits bought, sold, and certified?

Who makes sure that these deals are done honestly?

- Thanks for having me, Brad.

So Northeast Wilderness Trust will often start this process with a timber cruise, which gives us an idea of the timber volume for a particular property.

Then foresters like Justin actually will go back into the field and set out plots and calculate the amount of carbon stored in the forest, both the living and dead wood.

And then they make deductions for the particular characteristics of each piece of land in that particular region.

That then gets reported to the carbon developers, who after the process that Justin did a great job of explaining, is audited, certified, and registered, it becomes carbon credits.

And with one example being the American Carbon Registry, which is the one that we use.

And then the developer will market and sell those credits to an interested buyer, often a company looking to offset their carbon footprint.

And eventually, the last step of this is that it results in revenue for Northeast Wilderness Trust to continue doing our mission of conserving forever wild lands.

- Or, well, revenue for whoever owns the land, and in your case for the Northeast Wilderness Trust.

- That's right, yes.

In our case, it's lands that we own.

- Yeah, so John, a lot of carbon credits are being taken out on land that is still being actively logged.

And it seems to me like the calculation of additionality and on lands where carbon is being removed over time, as it's also being increased by growth over time, would get extremely complicated.

How does your organization deal with that?

- Yeah, so that is complicated.

And especially when you try to sell carbon credits on forests that are being actively managed.

The carbon stores go up and down with harvests and regrowth.

What we do at Northeast Wilderness Trust is slightly simpler.

And that's because Northeast Wilderness Trusts's program, Wild Carbon, avoids some of that gray area of fluctuation, because all the land that we are enrolling in carbon markets is A, newly protected land, and B, forever wild with zero logging, meaning that long after the carbon project expires, whether that's 40 years or 99 years or 120 years, the property will remain unlogged, sequestering and storing carbon indefinitely.

And as far as I know, the Wild Carbon program is the only regional kind of wilderness-focused carbon program in the country.

So every acre that is going through this program is forever wild.

- Yeah.

John, a question has come in from a listener, John Miller, and it's a good question.

It's a very basic question.

And the question is, who benefits from carbon credits and what are are the benefits of selling and buying carbon credits?

- That is a great question.

And a lot of people are wondering what is the purpose of this and what are the benefits to society?

And the benefit is that it takes a lot of capital to, one benefit, I should say, is that it takes a lot of capital to protect land, especially as wilderness, land that will never be logged again.

And just a sliver of total philanthropic giving in the United States is directed towards land conservation.

So carbon credit revenue, in the way that we approach it, is a really necessary and scalable way for organizations like Northeast Wilderness Trust to act more aggressively and urgently in the face of climate change, and go out and buy land at a larger scale than we've been able to do before.

- Yeah.

Yeah, and you recently, John, you recently used revenue from carbon credits to do a fairly large land deal in Vermont.

Can you tell us about that?

- Yeah, so oftentimes, carbon credits are generated after a property has been purchased.

Recently, however, we've been working to develop and sell credits as part of the actual transaction, or the purchase of the land.

And the revenue offered by carbon is, it actually becomes part of the deal that makes that conservation transaction a reality.

So as you mentioned, we recently did this on a property called Woodbury Mountain Wilderness Preserve now in Vermont, which at 6,000 acres is now the largest non-governmental wilderness area in Vermont's history.

So here's an example that gets back to your listener's question as well, of carbon credits being used in a very tangible way to convert previously timbered land and preserve it as forever wild on a large scale.

So the dollars that came out of that carbon sale went directly into the purchase of that land, and the permanent protection of it.

And that is a lot of permanent carbon storage and sequestration supported and really enabled by carbon credits.

- Interesting.

So do you get the sense, you've been in the carbon space for several years now, do you get any sense of where the selling and buying of carbon credits could be a few years from now?

What's gonna determine how quickly this market grows?

And what do you think the potential for it is?

- So I think the baseline to consider that question is recognizing the fact that anthropogenic human-caused climate change is here, period.

What we're thinking about is how we can avoid or avert the worst of it.

How do we stabilize the climate?

We need to do more than just offset carbon.

We need to actually reduce carbon emissions dramatically.

But one of the tools that we have at our disposal right now as we're figuring out how to reduce carbon emissions is protecting large and intact forests.

And wild forests are among the most effective way that we know how to store and sequester immense amounts of carbon.

And the co-benefits are through the roof.

And that includes biodiversity preservation, clean water, places for people to reconnect with nature.

So I personally think that there is an enormous upside and the potential is really, really big for conservation organizations to harness carbon markets, so long as it's done right, and it's going to permanent conservation.

- Yeah, okay.

Well, thanks very much.

So I wanna bring Mike DiNunzio back, 'cause a listener has a question for him.

Mike, are you there?

- Yes, I am.

Okay, so a question has come in, Mike, for you, and it's preceded by a comment.

The comment is, the APA has been so important over the years, but it's such a delicate balance in an area where people also need some degree of economic development in their hometowns.

And the question is, how did your team approach trying to keep an eye on important environmental preservation questions under these circumstances?

- Well, the APA Act itself pretty much excludes hamlets where the development exists already from permit requirements.

I mean, someone would have to propose some pretty big developments in a hamlet to even need a permit.

And it was decided early on that the best place to develop is where the development currently is, not in the back country, not in areas without services and whatnot, but the more we learn about protected wildlands, the more we understand that community economies in the north country here, actually are benefited greatly by the wildlands themselves.

They don't have to provide the public services, which they think, well, which over time accrue to more than the taxes that the community receives from that sale.

So really, I think we try to balance it.

We had community specialists.

We brought in town supervisors, and people on the APA board represent communities.

And that was all factored into the decisions about projects.

But as I said, they were almost always approved.

Didn't even need a permit in developed areas of hamlets.

And if they had permit conditions on them, we thought they could go ahead and do what the developer proposed in general, but still minimize adverse impacts.

- Yeah.

Yeah, well put.

I would also also add there that, in general, the strongest critics of the Adirondack Park Agency today are environmentalists who feel that it's not going far enough.

Another question for John Leibowitz has come in.

This is not directly related to carbon credits, but it is related to climate change.

John, I wanted to just throw in one additional co-benefit of large-scale land protection, as it relates to carbon, as it relates to climate change.

And that is the connectivity of open space and its ability to mitigate species loss.

Can you tell us about how your work relates to that goal, and give us some examples of places in the Northeast where open spaces are being connected so that species can migrate?

- Sure.

And the Adirondacks are the perfect example for this.

So to the east of the Adirondack Park is Lake Champlain.

And for 20 years we've been working on a wildlife corridor there called the Split Rock Wild Way, which connects the Split Rock Wild Forest, which is one of the largest undeveloped forests on Lake Champlain, on the New York side, to the high peaks to the west.

And conservation of parcels are ensuring that there will be a forested corridor for species movement over the long term.

And then on the other side of the park to the northwest, we're working with partner organizations on a corridor called the A2A, or the Algonquin to Adirondack Corridor.

And it's been identified through various data sets and studies as a really important wildlife movement corridor for climate change as animals and species adapt to a warmer climate and move north and south, east and west.

And it's a really important connectivity area from the Algonquin Park in Canada to the Adirondack Park.

So when you look at those combined, it becomes a pretty large movement area from Algonquin through the Adirondack Park, which is, of course, a huge place in and of itself.

And then over to Lake Champlain and beyond into the Green Mountains, White Mountains, and all the way to Maine.

it's all one big connected forest.

- Yeah, yeah.

That's really interesting.

I think we could do a whole show on that, John.

Maybe we'll have you back.

A question has come in from listener Jason Penge, or Penge.

I'm sorry if I'm mispronouncing it.

He asks, when land becomes an easement for the purposes of carbon credits, does that land come off the tax roles?

That is a great question, Jason, and in order to answer it, I need to separate those two things.

There can be conservation easements without carbon credits, and there can be carbon credits without conservation easements.

And if a privately owned piece of land is surveyed for carbon, and carbon credits are issued and the landowner receives money for those carbon credits, that I don't believe, and panelists, you can correct me if I'm wrong, I don't believe that has any effect on the land's taxable value.

Now, when a parcel of land has a conservation easement put on it, that's different.

And that's particularly important when conservation easements go on lakefront, lake shores, because lakefront land tends to be much more valuable than just basic forest land.

And so, a lot of people put conservation easements on lakefront land in order to reduce the taxable value of that land.

And that land does get deducted from the tax roll.

It still has some taxable value, but it has much less if the development rights are gone.

Now, in the Adirondack Park, there was a tremendous amount of land was taken off the tax roles by conservation easements, and the state legislature passed a law mitigating that, so that when a forest owner negotiated an easement and the town or village, well, usually mostly the town got less taxable value because of that easement being negotiated, then the state of New York made up the difference.

That's within the Adirondack Park.

In other parts of New York, that's not the case.

And there's always a delicate balance for land trust and conservation organizations outside of the forest preserve area and the Adirondack Park area when they're negotiating conservation easements to work with the towns in which those easements take place to make sure that it doesn't have an undo impact on the town.

I think that that's all the questions that I see.

And I wanna thank our three panelists tonight very much.

This has been a really interesting show.

And we're gonna end tonight with the last three minutes of our documentary.

The conclusion of the documentary sort of brings the APA into the present and links it to the struggle to control climate change.

And the clip includes two well-known residents of the Adirondacks, the authors Bill McKibben and Phil Terry, and Bill and Phil are gonna explain why they think the Adirondack Park is so important right now.

So we'll see that clip now.

- [Narrator] Today, the APA is far from beloved.

Few zoning boards are, but most park residents agree, development in the park needs to be regulated.

In fact, the agency's harshest critics now are environmental activists who say it isn't going far enough.

And despite its flaws, the APA remains a rare and important achievement.

It was one of the first efforts to protect the natural integrity of an entire region.

- The basic fact about the Adirondacks is people took a step back here a century ago.

And when they did, the natural world responded.

It recovered in profound ways.

Well, the world over, we're gonna need to figure out how to take a step or two back in the decades ahead.

I think that the lesson from the Adirondacks is that if we take that step back, that there'll be enormous benefits.

Nature retains some extraordinary power yet to fill in where we leave some space for it.

And the Adirondacks is the best example on the planet of that.

- [Narrator] The APA has endured because New York voters have always supported the agency's focus on protecting open space.

Urban and suburban voters are what keep the park forever wild.

- It's really a spiritual issue for a lot of people.

Wilderness, the idea of a nature that is not tampered with by people, is spiritually significant to a lot of people, including myself, and the Constitution of the state of New York makes it official.

And from the very beginning, there's been a cost involved there.

We're paying a price for this wilderness, and people of New York have decided it's worth it.

Of course, the big question for the next few decades is, will they continue to think it's worth it?

We're not sure.

Nobody knows for sure.

- [Narrator] In 2021, the APA celebrated its 50th anniversary in a world very different than the world of 1971.

Climate change has become an urgent global threat, and scientists agree, one of the most effective ways of reducing greenhouse gases is protecting and expanding large intact forests.

The APA's mission is balancing the health of the natural world and the needs of society.

With the reality of climate change bearing down on us, the entire planet is now racing against time to see whether it can reach the same goal.

(dramatic music) - You go to Alaska and you see what deep, deep wilderness looks like, but the Adirondacks is the Alaska of redemption, a place that was cut down, stand and sturm, but allowed to recover.

It's kinda second-chance Eden, and there aren't other places like that on the Earth.

It's an extraordinarily important place in a lot of ways right now.

- So I wanna thank our panelists, Mike DiNunzio, Jason Miller, and John Leibowitz tonight for volunteering their expertise in this very important, very complex subject.

You can see the entire documentary on a link that's posted elsewhere on the same WSKG webpage where this panel is posted, along with links to some of the organizations we've mentioned, and to the book's website, awildidea.com.

So thanks again to our panelists.

Thanks to all of you for watching.

And thanks to WSKG Public Media, and to everyone who's been here tonight.

Goodnight.

(gentle music)