The美国森林基金会和The Nature Conservancy今天宣布与REI Co-op, the nation's largest membership-based co-op and outdoor retailer, to empower America’s rural family forest owners to manage their forests in ways that sequester and store more carbon. The partnership will support the家庭森林碳计划，a joint forest carbon project of the American Forest Foundation (AFF), a national conservation non-profit that specializes in family-owned forestland, and The Nature Conservancy (TNC), a global conservation organization.

“REI focuses its work at the intersection of people and planet. AFF and TNC have done the same in their creation of the Family Forest Carbon Program,” said Matt Thurston, Director of Sustainability at REI. “The program is at the forefront of forest carbon strategies, using ground-breaking approaches that help small landowners join the fight against climate change.”

家庭森林碳计划是一项新的森林碳计划，植根于高融合气候的影响和对小型农村森林所有者的支持。该计划为拥有土地的家庭提供了专家保护指导和资源，并提供财政援助，以积极参与提高森林健康和生产力的实践。这些实践不仅增加了碳封存并存储在森林中，而且还可以提供重要的共同利益，例如改善水质，野生动植物栖息地和长期森林弹性。

The Family Forest Carbon Program measures and verifies the carbon captured through the program using a revolutionary new carbon accounting methodology that provides a transparent and credible carbon credit to the marketplace. Inspired by how control groups are used in medical trials, the Family Forest Carbon Program’s methodology uses scientific data to compare the carbon sequestration of enrolled properties that receive conservation and financial support to similar properties that are not enrolled in the program. This allows the program to remove a projected baseline and focus on observed and measurable data. This new methodology was designed by a team of experts, including representatives from TNC, AFF and TerraCarbon, and有望获得Verra经过验证的碳标准的批准at the end of this year.

AFF执行副总裁Rita Hite说：“每个人都在反对气候变化的斗争中发挥作用。”“我们的家庭森林碳计划的目标是通过在碳市场中包括家族企业林地来制定有意义且持久的碳固存和储存。REI的伙伴关系表明了他们对应对气候变化的斗争的坚定承诺，并推进了解决气候危机的更可持续和包容性的商业实践。”

Families and individuals, owning anywhere from 20 to 2,000 acres, collectively own the largest portion–39 percent–of the forestland across the United States. While家庭森林所有者引用they care about their land and want it to be healthy into the future, the majority are unable to do so. The main barriers are the lack of technical expertise and the high cost of management.

“If we are going to tackle the dual threats of climate change and biodiversity loss, we have to protect, restore, and sustainably manage forests – especially U.S. family forests,” said Matt Arnold, Global Lead, Impact Finance & Markets, for TNC. “Family forests have tremendous potential to sequester carbon through improved forest management practices. Yet they face unprecedented challenges due to climate change. This partnership with REI and AFF will allow us to continue removing the barriers smaller landowners often face, including carbon market access, lack of forest management expertise, and costs.”

The家庭森林碳计划first began enrolling landowners in portions of Pennsylvania in 2020, with expansions underway throughout the Central Appalachians, upper Midwest and Northeast U.S. The program plans to hold its first measurement and verification cycle of the performance of the forest practices in 2022, leading to the first transfer of verified carbon credits to buyers, like REI, thereafter. The program is signing长期出境协议为了购买经过验证的碳信用额，这些公司正在采取全面的气候目标方法，以减少排放，然后再努力消除他们无法消除的人。

有关更多信息，请访问美国森林基金会s newsroom.