Darkwoods. The name conjures up fairy tale images of a mysterious nature but the Darkwoods mentioned at a recent city council meeting is not the refuge of outlaws or witches. It’s real and it’s located a few hours drive away.
Darkwoods is a 55,000 hectare (135,907 acres) forested area on the west side of Kootenay Lake between Nelson, Salmo and Creston with an interesting history.
Duke Carl Herzog von Wertemberg, a German aristocrat, bought the land in 1967 as a potential refuge against Soviet expansion for he and his family. The Duke did permit some logging to go on while he owned the property.
Darkwoods is home to 19 confirmed threatened or endangered species including grizzly bears and mountain caribou and stands of old-growth forest.
Nature Conservancy of Canada (NCC) bought Darkwoods from the Duke in 2008 for $125 million with assistance in the amount of $25 million from the federal government. The purchase gained notoriety as the largest single private land conservation acquisition in Canadian history.
NCC is now using Darkwoods as an income generator in the lucrative carbon market and that is why it was mentioned at the city council meeting.
In 2008 the municipalities within the Kootenay and the Boundary region signed a Climate Action Charter that committed them to being carbon neutral with respect to their operations by 2012.
They agreed to measure their greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions; reduce those emissions a much as possible; balance the remaining emissions through the purchase of carbon offsets; and report publicly on the actions taken.
Carbon Neutral Kootenays (CNK) began in 2008 when the chairs of the Kootenay-Boundary, Central Kootenay, and East Kootenay decided to work collaboratively in their efforts to become carbon neutral.
A project team was created to facilitate the work of 31 local governments and First Nations people within the three regional districts. A part of the team’s work is to purchase offsets.
Negotiations between NCC and CNK on the price per tonne to be charged for the sequestration of carbon dioxide in Darkwoods are in their final stages.
When the government launched the carbon neutral program it created Pacific Carbon Trust (PCT) – a Crown corporation set up by the government in 2008 – with responsibility for buying carbon offsets at $25 per tonne.
PCT was required to invest the money it received in projects intended to reduce GHG emissions anywhere in B.C. that met a requirement called additionality.
Additionality means that any project supported by PCT must face economic, investment or technological barriers that prevent it from reducing its carbon footprint.
What is intriguing about the Darkwoods investment is that it does not qualify under the “additionality” criteria because there are no known barriers to NCC’s purchase of the property.
A second concern about the investment in Darkwoods comes from a report that PCT bought 403,112 tonnes of credits from Darkwoods at an estimated price of $5.70 per tonne, yet the 31 local governments in the CNK group will likely be paying a price closer to $25 per tonne.
Is the Darkwoods deal as good as it sounds? Are the stakeholders in the CNK getting the best deal possible? Why did CNK not invest in a project that fitted the PCT “additionality” requirement such as a wind or solar conversion industry?
The answers to such questions will only be known when PCT, NCC or CNK fully disclose the information on the project and the reasons for buying offsets from a 50-year -old conservancy that states that it “protects areas of natural diversity for their intrinsic value and for the benefit of our children and those after them.”
– Roy Ronaghan is a columnist for the Grand Forks Gazette