Encourage landowners to promote natural carbon sequestration and become part of the climate change solution.  Private landowners control most of the real estate in our State, including wetlands well-suited to capture and sequester carbon dioxide.  

The Virginia Energy Plan could offer private landowners a tax credit to maintain healthy forests and underlying soils that serve as carbon sequestration engines.

This could also include offering incentives to farmers to plant cover crops, expand forestlands, and maintain streams to capture and retain airborne carbon dioxide.

Virginia’s forestlands have excellent carbon sequestration capacity - estimated at 14% of annual emissions.  Our healthy trees can hold and retain massive volumes of carbon dioxide.  Underground root systems and accompanying soil systems can hold even more.

Properties with maximum sequestration capacity are in eastern Virginia, along the Coast, and around the Great Dismal Swamp National Wildlife Refuge near Norfolk.  Coastal forests offer excellent performance, and tidal hardwood swamps occur along all of the major Virginia rivers and waterways.  Valuable carbon sequestration forestlands stretch westward across the Chesapeake Bay watershed to the Blue Ridge and Allegheny Mountains.

Offering tax incentives by way of the Virginia Energy Plan would tell landowners that they are part of our State’s solution to the climate change problem. Every participant would have an ownership stake in how we choose to safeguard our State.