Seeking Land
Although the Replant.ca Environmental team plants trees in some highly visible locations such as environmental restoration projects and public parks, we also plant large numbers of trees in less visible "carbon capture" projects. These projects are intended to help sequester carbon. To be clear, we are not involved in carbon capture projects in order to reap carbon credits, nor do we intend to seek financial rewards from carbon credits in the future. We plant these projects because sequestering carbon will help to mitigate climate change, which is beneficial to our planet.
It can sometimes be a challenge to find suitable properties for carbon capture projects. From our perspective, the ideal property is one which is privately-owned, on which the landowner has recently harvested the lumber. Based on the fact that it will be several decades before the land would be ready for harvest again, these landowners sometimes decide to sell the property. This gives our team an opportunity to buy such properties and replant them for non-commercial purposes, taking them permanently off the market to build perpetual legacy forests.
If you have such a property, or know of someone trying to sell recently-harvested land, we'd like to talk to you. For the landowner, this can be an opportunity to receive some financial compensation for a property that may not be of much use to you any longer. And even though you may have harvested the existing forest, you're helping provide an opportunity for our organization to build a long-term legacy forest.
Ideally, we seek properties that have been harvested within the past 6-12 months. This is because an early replanting of the property will help allow our seedlings to get a better head start ahead of brush competition. We also seek properties that have permanent or seasonal road access to at least one point on the edge of the property, or that have a legally enshrined access agreement (easement) through adjoining properties. The ideal size is a minimum of twenty acres, although we often work with much larger properties. We typically focus on properties in Atlantic Canada, but are not averse to considering projects in other provinces. We typically pay approximately a minimum of $275 to $400 per acre for these properties (the current market rate in the Maritimes) depending on access and other features affecting suitability, and $350 to $500 per acre for properties with good public road access to at least one corner of the property.
If you have a property that might meet our guidelines, and you'd like to engage into an exploratory conversation about a potential sale, please contact our team by emailing Jonathan Clark at questions@replant.ca