Community Ecosystem Restoration Program (CERP)
ERA’s Community Ecosystem Restoration Program (CERP) is a new and effective way of restoring forest ecosystems in degraded areas that would otherwise not occur. The partnerships created with municipalities and other groups have proved to be an effective win- win situation in which carbon financing can fund the restoration work. The CERP initiative has many socio-economic and environmental benefits, including substantially reducing carbon levels in the atmosphere.
The CERP initiative involves the restoration of damaged streamside forest ecosystems that have been negatively impacted by development over the past 100 years. The goal of the restoration activities is to recover the high levels of carbon, biomass, and biodiversity that existed originally in these areas.
Many such disturbed native forests come back to dense stands of short-lived “pioneer” deciduous tree species, which is a natural process. However, given the extent of the disturbance, long-lived coniferous species do not re-establish. When these pioneer stands become old and die off after approximately 80 years, they are often replaced by invasive or non-invasive shrub communities. These conditions can persist for a long period of time (over 100 years). In such cases, the carbon storage and ecosystem functionality is dramatically lower than in the vigorous, native, temperate rainforest stands that existed originally.
Fully restored CERP streamside forests can contain up to 1200 more tonnes of carbon per hectare than the shrub/brush complexes that they replace. In ERA’s CERP projects, invasives and shrubs are manually cleared, and long-lived native trees are planted in a cluster pattern that mimics natural tree distribution.
It is important to note that CERP projects integrate meaningful community and stakeholder consultations in the planning and implementation process. As of the end of 2009, over 300 hectares of heavily disturbed coastal forest lands in British Columbia have been restored and enhanced by ERA’s CERP program. The CERP program is on-going, with over 150 hectares in coastal B.C. planned for restoration in 2010. The CERP template is also being adapted for similar ERA projects in Africa.
The CERP initiative establishes low risk, high yielding carbon sinks over the 100-year term of the projects. Regular maintenance is conducted on every site until such time as the trees are free growing from any competing brush, and monitoring continues thereafter for the life of the project. ERA has specifically chosen the type of ecosystems that, once restored, have the potential of becoming long term carbon reservoirs. Incidence of catastrophic events (i.e. fire, blow-down, flooding, insect attacks etc.) is very low. The CERP is third party validated and verified to the ISO 14064-2 and to the Climate Community and Biodiversity Alliance (CCBA) Gold Standard to ensure a high level of transparency and accuracy. ERA’s CERP represents an effective, integrated way of addressing the negative consequences of climate change while at the same time restoring high value forest ecosystems which provide a critical array of ecosystem services.
A copy of the CERP Project Design Document (PDD) is available for review upon written or email request. Please send email requests to customerservice@eraecosystems.com.
Afforestation
Afforestation is establishing a forest on land that is not a forest, or has not been a forest for a long time by planting trees or their seeds. The term may also be applied to the legal conversion of land into the status of royal forest.
Reforestation
The term reforestation generally refers to the reestablishment of the forest after its removal, or planting more trees for example from a timber harvest.
