Down a winding dirt road and dense forest canopy in Denmark, Maine, a two-story cabin sits on top of a hill, adorned with moose antlers. Bob Libby, who has owned the property since the late 1990s, refers to the building as his camp in the woods. He and his adult son spend November weekends there during hunting season. Libby’s hope is that the camp will stay in the family for generations to come.
Beyond being a home for white-tailed deer, the 1,650 acre property is filled with marketable wood. White pine and oak species have had years to grow before they’re eventually harvested and sent to the mills. But as the logging industry has changed since Libby bought the property nearly three decades ago, so has the business of being a landowner. Unpredictable and declining prices for wood products have prompted Libby to explore adding other revenue streams for his property.
“The prices we’re getting now are the prices I got, it seems like, 20 years ago. The cost of insurance, fuel, and equipment has doubled, so it’s a tough racket right now,” said Libby. “You can sell logs, but you can’t make a living on logs.”
Now, Libby is trying something new with his trees: letting them grow so they can store more carbon dioxide. The practice will generate carbon credits, introducing a new source of income for Libby that hinges not on his trees being cut down, but instead on having them grow tall.
Libby is among a growing cohort of rural landowners who are turning to the global carbon credit market. In Appalachia, coalfield restoration is providing another opportunity for rural communities to enter the carbon market. There, landowners who have bought or inherited abandoned mine land are working with forest managers to plant native trees. As the young trees grow, landowners can cash in on the carbon the trees take in each year.
Cliff Drouet is a forester with the U.S. Department of the Interior who works with the Appalachian Regional Reforestation Initiative (ARRI), a program that restores native habitats on old surface coal mines. He educates landowners about their options for managing and earning income from their land. Despite some controversy around the global carbon market, Drouet said that at a local level, the voluntary carbon market can be a “win-win” for rural property owners.
“This puts the landowner into the driver’s seat to negotiate a deal,” Drouet said.
Bob Libby spends November weekends at his camp on the woodlot in Denmark, Maine. Amidst growing development pressure, Libby said he hopes to keep the property in the family for generations to come. (Photo by Julia Tilton / Daily Yonder)
Controversial Carbon
Carbon credits are a commodity that can be bought and sold in voluntary markets in the United States and worldwide. The basic principle is that large entities, like countries or companies, can choose to invest in climate action or offset their own emissions by purchasing credits from communities and landowners. One carbon credit is equivalent to one metric ton of carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas, that would have otherwise been emitted. Forests act as a sink for carbon by breathing in planet-warming carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and storing it over long periods of time in a process called sequestration. This makes them a suitable candidate for the carbon market.
In exchange for carbon sequestration occurring in forests that otherwise would have been harvested or taken up less carbon over a given time period, landowners like Bob Libby are eligible to receive payments.
Globally, carbon credits have faced criticism in the sustainability world. Opponents argue that there are accountability problems with regulating a global market. The 2022 FIFA World Cup, the international soccer championship, was a high-level example of how large-scale carbon credits can go wrong: the event sparked controversy after its claims around carbon neutrality were debunked by an independent carbon market watchdog’s findings that FIFA’s carbon credit purchases were flimsy at best.
Q&A: Carbon Credits in Rural Communities
For landowners in rural parts of the U.S., the carbon market can offer tangible financial benefits. In Maine, where landowners are feeling a financial squeeze from encroaching development and fluctuating wood prices, forest carbon programs could help make ends meet, said Tom Doak, the executive director of Maine Woodland Owners, a trade organization for small-scale woodland owners, generally those with under 1,000 acres of land.
“One of the pluses, I think, of a carbon program is that it is a source of potential revenue. It’s not a lot of money, probably, but it does take some of the pressure off owning land,” Doak said.
Small-Scale Landowners Enter the Market
In Maine, as in other parts of the U.S., development pressures weigh heavily on property owners who rely on the land for their livelihoods.
Between 2006-2019, 16,600 acres of forestland were converted to non-forest uses across the Northern Forest, which includes Denmark, Maine, and the northern regions of New England and New York, per a 2023 report from the Northern Forest Center, a nonprofit organization focused on the forest economy. In the southern stretches of Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, and New York, 28,400 acres of forestland were converted to non-forest uses during the same time period, the report found.
“There’s a huge amount of pressure from development all across Maine. Land is very valuable, and I know for a fact that the value of land for development is way more than it would be to grow the trees,” said Ted Wright, a forester based in Brunswick, Maine.
Wright grew up on a potato farm in rural northern Maine and now works as an outreach forester for Renoster, a startup carbon credit developer. The firm works with small-scale landowners to match them with credit buyers. Wright is currently working with Libby to get his property set up with carbon credits.
Ted Wright gives a tour of Bob Libby’s property to Renoster’s team of scientists during a site visit to the Denmark, Maine lot on September 26, 2025. (Photo by Julia Tilton / Daily Yonder)
Though Libby hasn’t signed any paperwork yet, he expects the revenue he gets from the carbon credits on his land will be about enough to cover his annual property taxes. That’s about $8,000 a year paid to the state. In Maine, woodland owners with more than 10 acres can enroll in the state’s tree growth tax program, which bases taxes on the timber growth rather than development, helping to keep taxes relatively low. Still, it can be a burden on small-scale landowners to pay annual taxes on properties that might only harvest once every 15 years.
Renoster’s business model is tailored toward those with small parcels of woodland who may want to enter the forest carbon market but struggle with its accessibility. That’s because entry into the market hinges on a landowner knowing exactly how much carbon their trees are capable of absorbing over a given period, something that requires precise calculations down to the individual tree. Conducting that kind of surveying is pricey.
“There’s so much data collection, and so much ground data collection, that the cost has to be spread out over a lot of acres to make it worthwhile,” Doak said.
Unlike large-scale landowners who deal with tens of thousands of acres, citing hundred-acre parcels of land can cost more than what’s earned back from the eventual carbon credits. Even if a landowner isn’t paying for the surveying, the high startup costs and low returns on small parcels can deter carbon developers who match landowners with carbon credit buyers.
Renoster is trying to change that by keeping survey costs low. The company relies on remote sensing technology to gather information from above, rather than below. The firm uses forest data collected by laser instruments during flyovers done by the state of Maine and the U.S. Geological Survey to create detailed renderings of individual parcels, according to Mary Ignatiadis, a forest economist with Renoster.
With those renderings, Renoster’s team of scientists uses statistical practices to make calculations about carbon storage potential on given plots of woodland. Those calculations are then uploaded to the firm’s online forestry platform for landowners to access, per information Ignatiadis provided to the Daily Yonder.
Once a landowner decides to work with Renoster, the company then takes that landowner’s carbon measurements to a third-party registry that issues credits after verifying the calculations. Renoster uses Isometric, a New York and London-based registry that works with credit buyers, including Google and Microsoft. When the sale goes through, Renoster returns 65% of the revenue to the landowner, per Ignatiadis.
The best candidates for carbon credit enrollment are those with the most “room for improvement,” Wright said. That often means forestland that hasn’t been managed for carbon storage in the past. In Maine, this can include land that has previously been managed for heavy timber or pulpwood production, which involves more frequent harvests.
Members of Renoster’s team look at a map of Bob Libby’s property during a site visit on September 26, 2025. (Photo by Julia Tilton / Daily Yonder)
“Carbon programs are for landowners who are willing to change their management in some significant way to increase carbon sequestration rates,” Ignatiadis wrote in an email to the Daily Yonder.
At Libby’s property in Denmark, Wright and Libby anticipate taking down some older trees that aren’t as good at storing carbon to make room for younger trees that can take in more carbon as they grow.
The same principle applies in Appalachia, where Drouet does outreach with landowners across the eight-state region on what carbon credits can look like. He said carbon developers tend to prefer forests that are newly planted or are aging at uneven rates, meaning the trees were planted at different times.
“They prefer that as well, because that forest is growing at different stages and ages, you’ve got a healthy forest there,” Drouet said.
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