Knowledge base

At Forest Carbon, our expertise lies in woodland and peatland restoration, not carbon footprinting. That said, we’ve been working alongside the carbon accounting space for nearly 20 years and regularly advise businesses of all sizes on how to integrate nature into their net-zero strategies.

If your organisation has the resources but not the in-house skills, we recommend partnering with a reputable carbon accounting provider to support your greenhouse gas (GHG) measurement and reduction planning. We’re happy to recommend SmartCarbon, though many excellent organisations are offering this service today.

If you're a smaller business without the budget for a third-party provider, you can still support high-integrity UK nature projects even without a formal footprint. Our Carbon Club calculator includes simple guidelines to help you estimate a meaningful level of contribution. While we always encourage working towards a science-based reduction plan, you don’t need to wait to start making a positive impact.

As in other commodity markets, transactions in the UK voluntary carbon market often happen through brokers or retailers, who connect project developers with buyers. Traditionally, most trades have been conducted through private, over-the-counter negotiations. A broker typically purchases credits from the supplier and sells them to an end buyer, adding a commission for facilitating the sale.

While it’s possible to negotiate sales directly without a broker, the process can be complex. Pricing carbon credits isn’t straightforward — prices vary widely depending on factors such as project type, verification status, co-benefits, and market demand. On top of that, structuring sales contracts, managing risks, and understanding the long-term implications all require a solid grasp of the market.

That’s why it’s important to work with experienced, trusted partners. At Forest Carbon, we’ve spent nearly 20 years developing projects, building buyer relationships, and supporting transparent, high-integrity carbon transactions in the UK. Working with a trusted advisor can help ensure you’re making well-informed, credible decisions that deliver lasting impact.

Nature+ is a funding model we developed to help the UK make the most of its available land for nature restoration.

Across the UK, many small patches of land are ready to be revitalised with trees, flowers, mosses, insects, and more. Nature+ supports landowners with the costs involved, ensuring that no worthy project is held back due to funding constraints.

Key aspects of Nature+ include:

• Nature+ projects are not certified under the Woodland Carbon Code or Peatland Code. While we follow their principles to guide project design, these projects do not generate tradable carbon credits, so carbon compensation claims cannot be made.
• They focus on small, unproductive pockets of land across the UK that would otherwise remain unused.

They deliver important co-benefits such as flood mitigation, improved air quality, shelter for livestock, habitat creation, enhanced biodiversity, and better soil health.

Unhealthy peat is often light brown, very crumbly and will not hold water. Other signs include:

• Erosion: Visible tufts of peat indicate where the surrounding peat has been completely eroded.
• Bare peat: Exposed peat surfaces are open to the air, causing oxidation and carbon loss.
• Lack of vegetation: The absence of peat-forming plants like sphagnum mosses signals poor peatland health.

Forest Carbon may collect and/or create or otherwise obtain and process the following data about you:

• Information about you that you provide by filling in forms while registering for any newsletters or making purchases on our website;
• Information about you that you provide where we are entering into a contract together;
• We may also ask you for information when you report a problem or make a complaint and, if you contact us, we may keep a record of that correspondence;
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• Information about emails and other communications we have sent to you and your interaction with them.

Both the Woodland Carbon Code and Peatland Code accept projects of any size. However, smaller projects (typically under 5 hectares) may face challenges because the costs of validation and verification can outweigh the income from selling carbon credits.

At Forest Carbon, we help reduce these costs by grouping projects for validation and verification. Additionally, we’ve developed a sponsorship model called Nature+ designed specifically for smaller, charismatic projects that may not fit the Codes. Learn more about Nature+ here.

UK carbon credits can play a meaningful role in your net-zero strategy, particularly in supporting the neutralisation of residual emissions and for Beyond Value Chain Mitigation (BVCM), as recommended by the Science Based Targets initiative (SBTi).

At present, many UK projects offer ex-ante credits (such as PIUs under the Woodland Carbon Code or Peatland Code), which represent expected future carbon reductions. These cannot be used to compensate for emissions until they’re verified (i.e. converted into ex-post credits, such as WCUs or PCUs). That makes them unsuitable for near-term offsetting, but they can be a smart, forward-looking investment to prepare for future net-zero needs.

In addition to contributing to your long-term net-zero goals, buying UK credits supports domestic nature restoration, builds climate resilience in landscapes your organisation may depend on, and delivers visible co-benefits to local communities, biodiversity, and water quality — all of which can strengthen stakeholder trust and environmental credibility.

Additionality assesses whether actions like tree planting or peatland restoration would occur in the absence of carbon funding. It assesses whether that activity provides something 'additional' to a business-as-usual scenario. To qualify, the project must meet legal and financial additionality tests set out by the relevant accreditation standard. In the UK, that is the Woodland Carbon Code for woodlands, and the Peatland Code for peatlands.

Permanence refers to the critical requirement that sequestered or avoided carbon remains securely stored over the long term, especially when used by businesses to compensate for their emissions. While nature-based projects take precautions to mitigate the risk of reversal, it's impossible to guarantee permanent carbon storage in every case. For instance, a forest fire could destroy a woodland despite the best efforts of the landowner. Several safeguards are imposed to address potential risks at the outset, including management requirements and obligatory contract terms. However, where unforeseen and unpreventable risks such as wind, fire or disease do impact projects, certification standards hold a buffer pool system: where projects contribute a portion of their carbon credits to an untouchable reserve. This ‘buffer’ acts as insurance, covering any unexpected carbon losses and safeguarding the overall integrity of the system.

Together with additionality, permanence is a core requirement for standards such as the Woodland Carbon Code, Peatland Code, and independent rating agencies like BeZero.

We have a combined 55 years of experience in the carbon market industry. Our Founders, Steve and James, helped to kickstart the UK voluntary carbon market and its Codes. Additionally, across the team, we have experience in agricultural trading, finance, farming, forestry, ground gas analysis, teaching, surveying, property development, food security, GHG reporting, and more. To understand more about the skills across the team, visit our Team page.

The UK has ambitious targets for woodland creation. These targets can’t be met by large-scale planting projects alone, simply because there aren’t enough suitable contiguous pieces of land.

Smaller plots on less productive land offer a major opportunity if funding can be mobilised to unlock them. While individually modest, collectively these sites could significantly increase overall tree cover and deliver huge co-benefits, from biodiversity and flood resilience to carbon sequestration. It is also more likely that planting at this scale could fit within the farm landscape.

Our rough estimates suggest that, had our Nature+ sponsorship model been in place in 2023, we could have supported the planting of at least 53,000 additional trees across the UK that year.