Woodland Carbon Scheme: how it works

The carbon units that are purchased from the landowners by the Woodland Trust are then assigned to partners who want to support UK native woodland creation and meet sustainability objectives.

The key deadline for carbon projects is ensuring that the project is registered before any works begin on site. This then sets a window of three years to validate the planting projects, so that would happen once the trees are in the ground and the project is underway. After this, there's a continual process of verifications, the first one being at year five and then ten yearly intervals after that, and that involves quantifying the actual carbon absorbed by the trees on site.

The Woodland Trust get in touch with landowners well in advance of any monitoring visits and are always sensitive to landowner requirements and requests.
Registration is undertaken by the Woodland Trust and this involves registering the project on the UK Land Carbon Registry.

Woodland Trust Carbon projects are always based on conservation principles first, and the carbon element is an additional benefit.

Snaizeholme is a good example of where a project was designed first in consultation with lots of different bodies over a long period of time and different iterations of design, and then come up with a final design that's deemed most appropriate and best for biodiversity of the area. And then carbon is added on to the end of that as an additional benefit that supports the financing of the project.
We’re in the Snaizeholme Valley just a couple of miles south of Hawes in the Yorkshire Dales. A long long time ago this would have been all wooded. Previous land use has meant that the woodland here has been stripped back. Lot of sheep grazing in the past has meant that it's retained this sort of monoculture of grassland.

A big part of what the Woodland Trust is doing here is to plant trees. It brings a multitude of benefits for us here. In this landscape, the Yorkshire Dales is particularly un-wooded, one of the least wooded national parks and areas of the country. And we're looking at bringing woodland back into this landscape which will benefit an awful lot of wildlife. So we've got things like the black grouse in this area, they'll benefit from certain types of planting and for the shelter and the food source and also got a neighbouring red squirrel population here which will benefit. We also hope to bring back a lot of woodland specialists which you just don't see out in these landscapes.

As well as the benefits to wildlife, we’ve also got a lot of secondary sort of benefits here. A big one is flood mitigation so natural flood management, we have a lot of projects on the site that address them directly, but trees are a big part of that as well, with the interception of water and the transpiration there. Another big benefit is carbon retention. We have also got a lot of collaboration with a lot of universities on the site to start looking at the research behind all that and seeing what the actuals are.
Here at Snaizeholme we have gone about things a little bit differently.

We haven't brought any machinery on here to mechanically prep the ground. One of our main objectives is water quality and carbon retention. And so we wanted to minimise that ground disturbance as much as possible.