As global interest in greenhouse gas reduction grows, so does the opportunity to harness the forest’s capacity to store carbon for economic and social value. Forests are renewable resources that have vast potential for storing and sequestering carbon dioxide. This creates significant opportunity and responsibility for all stakeholders – government and community as well as investors, forest companies, and landowners.
The biggest challenge in developing and managing carbon projects is complexity. These projects often span decades and involve large and diverse forests, resulting in numerous factors and competing objectives to consider. This complexity makes carbon forestry an ideal fit for Remsoft’s optimization forest technology, which can help you develop and evaluate carbon projects in a way that is efficient, repeatable, and scalable.
Whether you need a custom solution specific to carbon management or want to integrate carbon as a value within your current forest planning system, Remsoft can help.
Manage Carbon Complexity with Optimization
Remsoft offers forest modeling and planning solutions powered by Woodstock Optimization Studio. Widely used in hundreds of forest types and management regimes around the globe, Woodstock provides optimization modeling capabilities for evaluating the multitude of options and decisions required to model and forecast forest carbon potential.
Using optimization analytics to develop and review carbon forestry projects provides these key benefits:
Support decisions with analytics
Optimize carbon management decisions using sophisticated analytics technology and mathematical optimization to identify and assess every variable. Using a comprehensive forest modeling framework, you can represent your forest, growth, decision options, constraints, costs, and revenues. With integrated mapping, you can visualize and report on your project spatially.
Analyze trade-off opportunities
Conduct scenario impact and trade-off analyses to quickly examine options, assess risk, and compare different projects and approaches. For instance, trade off forest harvesting with carbon, biomass, and other land uses to determine which revenue stream offers the most value. The plan can be ‘rolled forward’ by quickly accounting for actual progress and change.
Track onsite and offsite carbon pools
Look beyond the forest for carbon potential and consider the value of offsite carbon pools. By modeling and tracking carbon stored in both offsite wood products and the living biomass in the forest itself, you can more accurately assess the full potential of the forest asset.
Assess storage scenarios
Make the best carbon storage decisions by exploring numerous scenarios to determine which option would be the most beneficial. Consider the carbon potential of each storage option, examine the impact on other forest values, and adjust strategies to achieve the best results.
A Flexible Framework for Carbon Forestry
Remsoft’s purpose-built optimization applications for strategic, tactical, sales, and operations planning work together to create a complete forest management planning system. The technology has been used within government and the forestry sector across the globe for more than 30 years to meet multiple and diverse objectives.
Flexible and dynamic, the framework provides the ability to associate carbon stocks to forest conditions and forecast them over time. You can apply cost, revenue, and value to suit your business needs. You’re able to define and implement local and appropriate silviculture and other forest management activities within the model and see the impact of these on all forest values, including carbon stocks. And you can implement appropriate forest and habitat regulations, legal agreements, and certification requirements.
With the option to template your approach and add business system integration, you can rapidly deploy your solution across multiple projects.
Customize to Meet Your Project Needs
Integration with both linear (LP) and mixed-integer programming (MIP) solvers provide the ability to define an objective for your project and then calculate an optimal solution that defines which forest treatments, purchases, or sales should happen and when. Inputs and outputs are completely customizable, so you can build a solution that meets your specific needs and addresses your most challenging questions.
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- Is this the highest value use for this land base?
- What impact would increased carbon storage have on my other values and objectives?
- Would a different project provide a better return on investment?
- What risks are associated with this project, and how can I mitigate them?
- What is the optimal level of credits to sell from this project?
- What series of forest activities will achieve the best results?
- How sensitive are the returns on this project to the assumptions I have made
- What is the long-term impact of recent deviations from the plan?
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Be it an opportunity, a responsibility, or both: carbon management requires flexible, adaptable, and powerful modeling and optimization capabilities that are up to the challenge of complex forest carbon planning. With Remsoft optimization modeling technology, you can quickly and repeatably find the optimal path forward.
LEARN MORE:
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Download the Carbon Forestry Datasheet, for an overview of how Remsoft software can help model and forecast forest carbon potential.
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Read how Strategic Planning Optimization can help you balance different goals for the land base to maximize the present and future value of forest resources.
