Where tropical land is worth planting or protecting
We priced a forest-carbon project on every square kilometre of tropical land, and worked out the lowest carbon price at which each one would break even. Together those prices form a supply curve: how much land, and how much carbon, is worth acting on as the carbon price rises. We then add the revenue the forest would earn from the methane its bark takes up, which lowers each break-even price. No registry credits that methane yet, so we price it as a prospective credit to size the effect. This page reports what the curve shows. The full analysis is available to partners and investors under NDA.
Three effects of pricing bark methane
Pricing bark methane as a prospective credit changes reforestation economics in three ways. The effect on how much forest gets planted is indirect, working through those economics. Each effect has its own number, measured across the range of prices where carbon buyers transact.
What the supply curve shows
This section shows the supply curve the analysis is built on: for every square kilometre of tropical land, the lowest carbon price at which a forest project would break even.
Most reforestation becomes bankable between $50 and $75 a tonne
At low carbon prices, almost no tropical land is worth replanting. The bankable area rises steeply between about $50 and $75 per tonne of CO₂, then flattens, because by $75 most of the plantable land is already bankable. Whether a given site is worth replanting depends mostly on how fast trees grow there and how much farm income the land gives up.
Methane adds most to reforestation revenue
Valued as a prospective credit, the methane a growing forest takes up adds about 2 to 9% to its carbon revenue under the standard 100-year accounting, and about 10 to 40% under the newer rate-based accounting. That share is largest on slow-growing, marginal land, which is the land sitting closest to the bankability threshold. For a standing forest protected from clearing, the methane saved is small next to the biomass carbon saved, though it is not zero.
For protection, price is rarely the obstacle
A protection project gives up farm income only on the small share of forest that would be cleared in a given year. That makes almost all at-risk tropical forest cheap to protect, so the carbon price rarely decides it. What decides it is whether the forest was genuinely going to be cleared, and whether the protection lasts and is well governed. Because those judgments differ from project to project, we report the credited carbon as a range.
The cost comes from measured farm income
The largest cost of a reforestation project is the farm income the land would give up. We take that from a published map of net farm income across the tropics, and check it against two independent maps of farm value. Measured income removes the biggest source of guesswork in a model like this.
The geographic pattern
Because the same pricing runs across the whole tropics, the analysis also shows where reforestation is more or less readily bankable. This is a deliberately coarse view: three broad tiers, no site-level detail. The precise maps are part of the full analysis.
How we analyzed it, by category
Each category rests on its own models, built on the same project economics and reproducible end to end. The figure on each card is the effect it measures.
More land becomes worth planting
The bankable frontier
How much tropical land becomes worth financing at each carbon price, priced kilometre by kilometre.
+3 to 6 Mha newly bankable (GWP*)The market for the credits
Clearing the land supply against where carbon buyers transact, instead of reading the effect at a single price.
methane moves the clearing price ~2%Scarce financing builds more of it
A single project's cash flow
The full cash flow of one reforestation project, including the upfront money it must raise before any credits arrive.
funding gap down 6% to 24%Which constraint binds first
Whether the shortage is bankable land or the capital to plant it, and how far a fixed pool of financing stretches.
a larger frontier for about the same costFewer projects fail before they deliver
Surviving the years before credits
How a project's early cash helps it through the years it spends in the red, where many projects fail.
survival up 7% to 35%Methane as steady revenue
Why a revenue stream that keeps paying when tree growth falls short helps more than its size would suggest.
steady revenue where projects failA fourth question is the value of measuring now. The rate-based accounting values this methane several times higher, and no registry uses it yet. A project that measures from the start can claim that upside if the accounting is adopted; a project that never measured cannot go back and claim it. That record is worth about 0.9 million hectares that only measuring can capture.
How to read a supply curve
Each parcel of land has a break-even price: the lowest carbon price at which a project there clears a 12% return. At a given carbon price, the bankable land is every parcel whose break-even sits at or below it. Adding the methane revenue lowers each break-even price, so at the same carbon price more land becomes bankable.
The shape of the reforestation supply curve
How the methane credit would change over time
No registry credits bark methane yet; a methodology is in the pipeline. To size its effect on bankability, we priced it as a credit under the two accountings used for methane. The 100-year metric (GWP100) is the standard registries apply today. The rate-based metric (GWP*) follows a short-lived gas's warming more closely, and no registry credits on it. The two value the same uptake differently over the life of a project.
The full analysis is available under NDA
This page is the summary. The full spatial bankability analysis carries the method, the per-price results for both credit types, the measured cost and bankability maps, the sensitivities, and the decision record. We share it with partners and investors under a mutual NDA. Get in touch and we will share it and answer questions.
Figures on this page are illustrative under stated assumptions, and are not forecasts of what SelvaFlux will deliver. Bark-methane crediting is not yet approved, so the methane revenue is priced as a prospective credit.