Carbon Accretion and Riparian Benefits (CARB) is a group forestry-based carbon capture project spanning over 18,000 acres (12,183 forested acres) of land across Arkansas, Louisiana, Oklahoma, and Texas. The goal of the project is to provide a mechanism to aggregate tracts of land with similar forest types to create larger conservation corridors. The pilot project began in 2022 with the enrollment of 14 initial landowners. To date, over 200,000 hardwood seedlings have been planted. Over 30,000 metric tons of CO2e is estimated to be sequestered annually within the pilot project area (almost 1MM tons in the project baseline). A baseline carbon inventory report was submitted in July 2023 and initial credit issuance was approved in October 2023. Generating revenue via land use practices that enhance carbon capture in natural sinks provides an incentive for adjacent landowners to participate in the project, while encouraging broader adoption of conservation practices as new tracts are enrolled annually. Through these annual enrollments, the project will continue expanding to link forested areas to form conservation corridors along the Red River, its tributaries, and their adjacent wetlands. CARB is designed to be complementary to the USDA Agricultural Conservation Easement Program (ACEP), which includes Agricultural Land Easements (ALE) that have established forestry-based conservation practices on easements across the project region. In response to historic regional deforestation, these easement programs have effectively replanted or protected native hardwood forests, thereby preventing the conversion of these working lands to non-agricultural uses. The resulting patchwork of conservation easements presents an opportunity for aggregation of both ACEP lands and adjacent tracts to create a broader habitat protection project. Additionally, over 60% of the acreage enrolled in USDA-ACEP that were measured as part of the baseline study will require active intervention to successfully reestablish native hardwood timber stands. Beyond these ACEP easements, a wide variety of managed and unmanaged timber exists in the region; however, this pilot project is strategically focused on the following forest types: – Reforested agricultural lands; – Native bottomland mixed hardwood stands; – On-going afforestation, reforestation, and revegetation (ARR) opportunities; and – Commercially managed forests adjacent to the forest types above. Grouping these forest types that exist in similar settings to the ACEP easements encourages the expansion of conservation corridors over time. Properly stratifying each participating tract added to the project over time will allow for increased statistical confidence in the mean carbon inventory and accrual rates within each strata of the group project. The CARB project development leverages revenues generated from the voluntary carbon credit market and connects privately owned tracts to protect and enhance riparian habitats. Participating landowners receive 60% of net credit revenue and the payment structure incentivizes owners to improve newly planted, recently converted or existing bottomland hardwood stands into more resilient stands, which contain highly durable stocks of forest-based carbon and provide many other co-benefits. (Link to CARB project documentation)