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 the rancher up front, sized to roughly ten years of carbon credit value. Cattle keep grazing and daily operations do not change. On forestland, they provide 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 they develop and verify the credits, sell them to companies with climate commitments, and once the investment is recovered, ongoing carbon revenue flows back to the landowner.

They are the country's only source of carbon funding for grassland conservation. They wrote the Climate Action Reserve Grassland Protocol in 2015 and the ACR avoided conversion methodology in 2013, formed the first rancher carbon cooperatives, have partnered with The Nature Conservancy on projects like Zumwalt Prairie in Eastern Oregon, and in 2024 closed a $2 million investment protecting 38,000 acres of a fifth-generation Montana ranch. This year they announced a partnership with the Land Trust Alliance to fund grassland easements nationally.

Who fits: grassland owners with roughly 1,200 acres or more at real risk of conversion to cropland; forest owners with reforestation or management goals at a range of scales; land trusts and Tribes with forest or prairie holdings. Current grassland projects are in Montana, Oregon, and Colorado. Easement funding can stack with NRCS Agricultural Land Easement money.