Our mission:
To keep America’s urban forests standing by making preservation financially viable for landowners.
Urban forests are a vital asset for the American way of life
Providing many benefits including improved air quality, flood protection, and quality jobs, urban forests are key to beautifying our cities and enhancing our quality of life.
Yet many landowners are unable to bear the costs of sustainable forest management, particularly in the face of the threat of reduced federal funding.
Why we built Three Oaks Carbon
Most attention in conservation focuses on distant wilderness or large-scale industrial forestry. But the forests in our own backyards (the woodlots, neighborhood groves, suburban green spaces, and family-held parcels at the edges of fast-growing American metros) were quietly disappearing under development pressure. Nobody was building infrastructure to preserve them. Landowners facing real financial pressure to sell to developers had no economically rational alternative. And the carbon those forests stored, along with the air quality, stormwater, and community benefits they delivered, was being lost with them.
We saw that a carbon credit business model could solve this. If verified credits could be issued for preserving these specific forests, landowners could earn meaningful income for doing what they likely wanted to do anyway: keep their land standing. Cities and communities would retain the green infrastructure those forests provide. And buyers focused on local-impact, US-based carbon projects would have something tangible they could point to.
Three Oaks Carbon was built around that thesis. We work parcel by parcel and portfolio by portfolio to make forest preservation economically viable for landowners facing development pressure. We don’t ask landowners to choose conservation over their financial interests. We make it possible to do both.
Worth more standing
A forest on the edge of a growing city quietly does the work of expensive public infrastructure: it absorbs stormwater, cools the streets around it, cleans the air, and stores carbon. these services are provided year after year, for free. None of that shows up in an appraisal. On paper, a near-city forest is worth whatever a developer would pay to clear it, and nothing for what it does while it stands. For most owners, the only way to realize their land’s value has been to destroy it.
Three Oaks Carbon exists to change that math. We put a real, contracted price on what a standing forest provides, so keeping it can finally compete with paving it. Make a forest worth more alive than gone, and preservation stops being a sacrifice.
Integrity at our core
We are committed to a thoughtful approach to protecting urban forests that are genuinely under threat.
Our projects are developed under two complementary methodologies, City Forest Credits and the American Carbon Registry’s Active Conservation and Sustainable Management, both subject to rigorous third-party verification and our own internal screening standards before any parcel enters our pipeline.
Get in touch
If you’d like to find out more about our work preserving America’s urban forests, please get in touch.
Email: [email protected]
Three Oaks Carbon
950 W Bannock St
Suite 1100
Boise, ID 83702
USA
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