Woodland Carbon: finances

The Woodland Trust make the landowner a financial offer for all of the carbon units within the project.

Projects generally sequester somewhere between 250 and 400 tonnes of carbon dioxide per hectare over a project's duration. And this represents a financial value somewhere between £3,000 and £5,000 per hectare.
Carbon funding can be combined with woodland creation grants and stacked up to create a project that is financially viable.

The UK’s 2050 targets for net zero mean that carbon projects that are planted now are going to have a high value, especially for units that mature before 2050.
Payments are made to landowners in three stages, 70% is paid after planting, the next 15% is paid at year five, and then the final 15% is paid at year 15. And all of these payments are index linked.

So within the carbon offer all of the costs are known upfront and that is included within the price that is offered to the landowner.

Productive woodland is possible under the woodland carbon code and this is factored into the carbon calculations at the start of the project. So generally if you're going to take a thinning from a woodland, obviously over the lifetime of the project, this will sequester and lock up less carbon than if you hadn't thinned the woodland. But it still represents a significant storage of carbon, even in a thinned woodland.