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Forestry Commission confirms £30 per tonne reserve price for upcoming woodland carbon offset auction
Farmers, land managers, and businesses are today being invited to apply for funding through the latest phase of the £50m Woodland Carbon Guarantee scheme ahead of the application deadline of 30th April.
The Forestry Commission, which runs the scheme, announced the timetable for the seventh round under the initiative confirming a £10m auction will take place between the 15th and 21st of May.
Following the online auction process, successful bidders will be offered the option to sell woodland carbon in the form of Woodland Carbon Units - a financial value given to each tonne of carbon stored - to the government over 35 years at a guaranteed price protected against inflation.
Following customer feedback, the Forestry Commission said it has made some changes to the latest auction round, including removing project categories to make it easier for bids to be prepared and publishing a reserve price of £30 per Woodland Carbon Unit to give prospective applicants more confidence and clarity when applying.
"Now in its seventh round, it's encouraging that the Guarantee has continued to grow in its success, supporting the creation of 2,810 hectares of new woodland specifically to help combat the many and varied impacts of climate change by increasing tree-planting across the country," said Richard Stanford, Chief Executive of the Forestry Commission. "I strongly encourage farmers, foresters and land managers across England to submit their applications to the Guarantee ahead of the application deadline on 30 April."
However, the Forestry Commission stressed that before preparing an application land managers should register with its Woodland Carbon Code, which provides them with the tools and information required to verify and record the carbon they are capturing so that they can then sell the resulting Woodland Carbon Units.
The news comes just days after Defra last week announced that over £14m of funding has been awarded to applicants to Round 3 of its Local Authority Treescapes Fund (LATF) and Round 5 of the Urban Tree Challenge Fund (UTCF), which aims to encourage non-woodland tree planting programmes and improve access to nature across the country.
"Trees improve people's quality of lives and are vital to our ambition to reach net zero by 2050," said Forestry Minister Trudy Harrison. "This funding will continue to level up people's access to nature, which we committed to doing in our recently published Environmental Improvement Plan. We want to see inspiring projects that plant more trees across England."
The latest funding awards are part of the government's push to deliver on its goal to treble tree planting rates in England by the end of this Parliament and plant 30,000 hectares of trees across the UK per year by 2025.
The government has faced criticism from campaign groups and MPs in recent years who have warned that current tree planting rates are badly off track to meet Minsters' stated targets.
