Carbon Sequestration
ESF is committed to a comprehensive approach in mitigating the College’s carbon footprint.
Projects include energy conservation and efficiency, green building, building controls, clean energy systems, virtual power purchase agreements, electrification, and deep decarbonization. We continually evaluate ways to further monitor and mitigate the College’s carbon footprint and strives to actively contribute to positive climate action including:
- Quantifying and including additional GHG sinks, sources and fluxes in the ESF carbon budget, such as belowground forest biomass
- Research on remote sensing of continuous forest inventory plots
- Visualizations of forest regeneration and carbon sequestration over time
- Second Nature Carbon Offset Network projects, such as community tree plantings
- Forest carbon policy and management strategies
- Application of PAVER metrics to offset and sequestration projects
- Outreach and curriculum integration
ESF Forest Properties
ESF Forest Properties manages 25,000 acres of College forest properties that sequester carbon from the atmosphere in the form of standing biomass in the forest. ESF staff and students monitor forest growth across a series of permanent plots each year and the data are publicly available open access on the web. ESF and Cornell College of Agriculture and Life Sciences (CALS) founded the Climate & Applied Forest Research Institute (CAFRI) in 2018. Among other work products, CAFRI released the New York Forest Carbon Assessment in 2023.
Through sustainable forest management, forests can continue to grow, sequestering additional carbon in standing biomass each year, while also providing a range of other goods, ecosystem services and opportunities for teaching and research.
