The Climate Trust

The Climate Trust is a Portland, Oregon nonprofit that has worked in carbon markets since 1997. Read "carbon credits" on their homepage and it is easy to file them as an offset broker. What they actually do is different: they fund land protection up front and recover the cost by selling the carbon.

They work with family ranchers, private forest owners, Tribal nations, public landowners, and land trusts. On grassland, a rancher agrees to a permanent no-till conservation easement, recorded with a land trust, and The Climate Trust pays up front toward the cost of that easement. Cattle keep grazing and daily operations do not change. On forestland, it provides up front financing for reforestation after wildfire and for improved forest management on working timberland, with patient nonprofit capital that can wait for trees to grow. In both cases it develops and verifies the credits and sells them to companies with climate commitments, and the landowner receives ongoing carbon revenue, with the split set in the contract.

The Trust describes itself as the country's only source of carbon funding for grassland conservation. It says it helped write the Climate Action Reserve Grassland Protocol in 2015 and the American Carbon Registry's grassland methodology in 2013, and formed the first rancher carbon cooperatives. It has funded projects with The Nature Conservancy, including the Zumwalt Prairie in eastern Oregon, and in late 2024 it and Inlandsis Fund put $2 million into easements covering nearly 38,000 acres of a fifth generation Montana ranch. It partnered with the Land Trust Alliance in 2020 to help scale carbon investment in grassland conservation for smaller landowners.

Who fits: grassland owners with at least 1,200 acres who are ready to protect it from development and conversion to cropland; forest owners with reforestation or management goals at a range of scales; land trusts and Tribes with forest or prairie holdings. Its best known grassland projects are in Oregon and Montana. Easement funding can be used alongside NRCS Agricultural Land Easement money.

Read more: how carbon funded conservation easements work, the story of two ranches, carbon finance for forests, and a checklist for your own land.