The sound of leaves crunching underfoot accompanies Cakey Worthington as she walks into a forest of pines and oaks in the Atchafalaya Swamp. She stops at a rebar marker set in the ground and then walks to a nearby tree.

“We come back every five years to re-measure all the trees at this site,” she said as cicadas sang nearby.

Worthington is vice president of carbon management at Aurora Sustainable Lands, a timber company that spends more time preserving trees than cutting them down. The company now owns about 100,000 acres of land in the Atchafalaya Basin.

Instead of harvesting the trees on its land, Aurora plans to sell the climate-warming carbon dioxide gas stored in the trees to other companies.

More and more companies are committing to reducing their own contribution to climate change. Companies like Aurora offer companies a way to offset their greenhouse gas emissions. Trees naturally absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, releasing oxygen while keeping the carbon locked up in their wood. Companies then pay Aurora for the carbon stored and buy what are known as carbon credits. Aurora sold over $100 million worth of carbon credits. until the end of 2023.

The system is called emissions trading. It is based on the assumption that the carbon accumulated in trees offsets some of the emissions released into the atmosphere by their factories or supply chains. It’s like paying someone else to use less water so you can continue to take long showers even when water is scarce.

Globally, the industry has taken off over the past 20 years. In the South, however, the carbon credit industry is still nascent and just starting to gain traction. Aurora is one of the few companies starting to sell credits made from Louisiana trees.

Back in the woods, Worthington takes out a tape measure. She wraps the white tape around the tree and pulls it tight.

“We look at the side and make sure there are no bumps or lumps or anything like that,” she explains. “We pull the tape measure tight. We measure carefully.”

This particular tree has grown just over an inch in two years.

“It’s getting bigger, it’s a nice, straight tree,” Worthington said. “It has a lot of timber value for us and it also stores a lot of carbon.”

To determine the amount of carbon stored on Aurora’s land, foresters measure a sample of trees at 280 locations on the property. The company then projects how many carbon credits it can sell based on the growth and loss observed at these small sample locations.

The Aurora plan also calls for improving the management of forests. When trees are threatened with deforestation, a company that recognizes carbon credits can claim that the trees would not exist without the company’s management. Much of Aurora’s land, for example, was purchased from a traditional logging company. The company can then sell even more carbon stored in the trees by comparing it to a type of alternate reality – also known as a counterfactual scenario – created through projections. The company has not disclosed how it designs its carbon credits program.

“The forest carbon market is definitely robust. It’s been around in its modern form for over a decade, which means our quantification methods are really robust,” Worthington said. “There is no single solution that can address the climate and the challenges we face.”

That process can leave room for uncertainty. Worthington said Aurora is committed to ensuring the loans it sells are not inflated. Researchers who closely scrutinize the industry say that would be a rare exception.

Barbara Haya, who heads the University of Berkeley’s Carbon Trading Project and has studied the industry for two decades, said carbon credits have remained largely unregulated and are managed mainly by private companies, leading to a “race to the bottom” that renders the credits sold meaningless.

“We see that there is significant over-crediting in all major compensation programs,” said Haya. “This is something of a chronic problem in the compensation industry.”

Recent studies and investigations, including one by the guardian, have found that the vast majority of carbon credits sold in the United States to date do not represent any real reduction in emissions. Haya pointed out that the only real way to curb climate change is to drastically reduce emissions.

She questions the fundamentals of the industry and calls the term “carbon offsetting” a “misnomer.” She says the damage is done once greenhouse gas emissions enter the atmosphere.

“This cannot be undone,” she said. “The limited capacity of the atmosphere has been used up.”

To seriously address climate change, she advises people to focus on reducing their personal greenhouse gas emissions rather than investing in offsetting investments.

“We don’t have time to keep generating emissions,” said Haya. “We are in a climate emergency and we need to reduce our emissions as quickly as possible.”

Although the credibility of carbon credits is shaky, projects like Aurora’s are helping to protect trees.

Buck Vandersteen, director of the Louisiana Forestry Association, said the carbon credit industry offers landowners the opportunity to keep their forests standing rather than selling them to developers who would cut down the trees.

“The more incentive you give people to grow trees on their land and in their forests, the better,” he said.

Vandersteen said he helped another company, NativState, work with private landowners in northeast Louisiana to sell the carbon accumulated in their forests. The company now manages 21,000 acres and has sold more than 2.4 million credits.

He said that as the industry grows in Louisiana, he expects the conventional lumber industry to maintain its strong position in the state. In other parts of the country, lumber companies have opposed preserving trees for carbon credits because it could push them out of forests near sawmills. Driving farther away to forests increases costs and emissions.

“It will find its balance,” Vandersteen said. “I think people are worried that all the land will be tied up and no one will be able to cut down a tree. I don’t think that will ever happen.”

Worthington said the company manages its forests in the Atchafalaya Swamp holistically. It manages them for carbon capture, harvests select trees and ensures that a diverse mix of species thrives in the habitat. The company works with the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries to monitor the state’s black bears and offers hunters recreational access to the land to keep the deer population under control.

“We have families who have been recreating here for generations and leasing the land,” Worthington said. “Out of season, these groups often come just to enjoy the property.”