Trefadder: Climate Forests in Coastal Norway

The Trefadder Coastal Norway Climate Forest Project increases forest carbon stocks on outfield land (utmark) in western and southwestern Norway that is no longer in active agricultural use, by establishing productive forest on areas that today carry only slow growing, unmanaged regrowth. The project areas are dominated by downy birch (Betula pubescens) that colonised the land following the long term decline of outfield grazing and mowing, a decline driven by structural change in Norwegian agriculture and independent of the project. No part of the project area has been managed for wood products in the ten years preceding the project start date, and because no harvesting has taken place, no statutory obligation to regenerate applies. On these sites carbon accumulates only at the rate of natural birch succession, well below the biological potential of the land. The baseline is not assumed to be zero. It is quantified as a dynamic performance benchmark derived from remotely sensed control plots on comparable unmanaged land outside the project area, matched to the project on historical and initial vegetation cover and updated at each verification event. Net removals are the difference between measured project carbon stocks and that benchmark. Following implementation, Norway spruce (Picea abies) is planted beneath the retained birch canopy at 2,500 seedlings per hectare, using seedlings of controlled provenance. No timber is felled, extracted or sold. The birch is retained as shelterwood while the spruce establishes and is then girdled and left standing within the project area, where the resulting loss of living biomass and its transfer into dead wood is accounted in full. As the planted stands develop, carbon accumulates in biomass at a substantially higher rate than under continued natural regrowth. Parcels holding registered conservation values, key habitats, organic soils or peatland are excluded at enrolment. No drainage, ploughing or mechanical soil disturbance is carried out anywhere in the project area. Carbon pools whose exclusion is conservative are left out of the calculation, and leakage is quantified rather than assumed, with any beneficial leakage left uncredited.