The CMEEC 15-Acre Carbon-Offset Forest

In 2000, RTT partnered with the Connecticut Municipal Electric Energy Cooperative (CMEEC) to plant a 15-acre forest in Costa Rica to offset the CO2 emissions from CMEEC’s office and vehicle emissions.  CMEEC is a publicly directed joint action supply agency formed by the state’s municipal electric utilities.

Shown to the right is the 8-year old CMEEC forest ready to be thinned for farmer income. The remaining forest, after thinning, will continue to sequester and store the CO2 emissions from CMEEC’s administrative emissions.  RTT measures most forests annually to calculate the sequestration rate in this applied research program.

Shown left, RTT staff making measurements on some of the 8-year old trees in the CMEEC forest in Costa Rica.  The worker in the tree is measuring the upper diameters of the Chancho trees to be able to accurately calculate their form class, volume and carbon content.  Thinnings are an important part of the RTT Model of carbon-offset forests.  The RTT Model includes thinnings of forests for farmer income as a way to make the forests sustainable. Sustainability is the key to long-term, indefinite carbon storage in forests.

The graph shown below details the carbon sequestration and growth rate in the CMEEC forest.  The total amount of CO2e stored in the 6.32 hectare forest in just 18 years is 2301 metrics tonnes.  The average annual sequestration rate is 20 MT CO2e/year/hectare.