Monitoring

Once the woodland is planted, it’s important that we all know how it’s doing. All of our woodlands are inspected at year 1 and year 5 by the Forestry Commission, and by Forest Carbon thereafter at least 5 yearly. In reality we inspect them more than that – as we’re often out visiting projects with clients, or assessing prospective projects, or monitoring a project, we’ll nearly always be travelling past others en route and drop in to have a look. In addition to this we get photographs taken annually at the sites, both for our own monitoring purposes and to send to clients.

Our carbon calculator has a very generous safety margin (called a ‘buffer stock’ in carbonland), and this will mean that if there were any problems identified at a site there is an extremely high chance that there would still be more carbon captured than was bought.  If there were a problem then under the terms of our contract with landowners they would make good the situation, but we thoroughly appraise the risks of every project before we undertake it and to date we have had no failures.

Now that the Forestry Commission Woodland Carbon Code is in place we will agree a monitoring schedule with the independent third party body that will be assessing our performance against the Code, and they will then check up on us by spot checking our monitoring activity.