Carbon Credits with the White Mountain Apache Tribe

SIG Carbon Helps Facilitate Credit Registration in the Largest Project of its Kind

Helping the Tribe Generate Revenue, Promote Resilience, and Support Climate Change Action

SIG serves as the forest carbon technical advisor to the White Mountain Apache Tribe (WMAT) for the Tribe’s Improved Forest Management California carbon projects. The projects cover over 200,000 acres, allowing the Tribe to register millions of Air Resource Board credits with California’s statewide cap-and-trade program–at the time the largest ever California compliance offset project.

SIG was responsible for inventory design, statistical analysis, carbon quantification and modeling, project verification guidance, and long-term Measurement, Reporting, and Verification (MRV) management. We also assessed how the tribe could maximize revenue from a carbon project while balancing other resource and cultural priorities.

Accessing Carbon Credits

The Fort Apache reservation encompasses 1.68 million acres in eastern Arizona. The land is covered with diverse vegetation and topography, meaning the ecosystems and land uses are also diverse. Accordingly, the reservation requires complex land management. The White Mountain Apache Tribe recognized that carbon markets offer ways to both offset global carbon emissions and promote tribal resilience. WMAT selected SIG to assist with navigating the technicalities of a large-scale forest carbon offset project.

Managing to Increase Carbon Stocks

At the time, this effort was the largest improved forest management carbon project ever under California’s cap-and-trade compliance regulatory program. WMAT asked SIG to help with the development of a second, even larger, forest carbon offset project. The goal was to manage the forest to increase and conserve carbon stocks – and therefore carbon dioxide sequestration – through uneven-aged management. SIG’s financial analysis of the anticipated growth and harvesting regimes captured all costs and returns given the legal, physical, and biological constraints. We found that the new growth and harvesting regimes were financially feasible and ecologically sound, and our ongoing work on this project seeks to implement and expand these plans.

The long term relationship between SIG and the White Mountain Apache Tribe is an example of our commitment to enduring relationships that yield real ecosystem and community benefits.

Empowering Future Generations

Carbon credit projects like this are legally required to last a century, so long term collaboration and commitment is essential. To this end, Tribe members have updated their existing monitoring protocols to include monitoring required for the carbon projects. These skills enable the Tribe to consolidate project costs while navigating the complexities of California’s carbon market.

Forest Carbon Offsets