The climate case, in full
The Bigger Climate Story
Through their bark, trees pull methane out of the air, a potent greenhouse gas that standard carbon accounting leaves out. It was measured only recently, and no market prices it yet. This page covers the science, and what it is worth to the climate.
The fastest lever we have
Methane Is the Fastest Way to Cool
Carbon dioxide is the long story of warming. Methane is the fast one. It is short-lived, perhaps a decade in the air, and while it is up there it holds heat far harder than CO₂ does. That makes removing methane now one of the most direct ways to buy near-term cooling.
The 28× You May Have Heard Is an Average
You may have heard methane is about 28× worse than CO₂. That figure averages its warming across 100 years, most of them long after the methane itself is gone. Average a short pulse over a century and it looks smaller than it is. Over the 20-year window that decides near-term warming, methane’s effect is far larger.
There is a metric built for exactly this, for short-lived gases whose timing the 100-year average smears out. It is called GWP* (). By GWP*, removing a tonne of methane today is worth on the order of 128× a tonne of CO₂ over 20 years. That is the number we use when we talk about climate benefit.
What the accounts miss
Forests Breathe Methane In
Most methane talk is about emitting less of it. Forests remove it instead. Microbes in tree bark consume atmospheric methane. The sink was measured across upland forests worldwide, not modeled, and published in Nature ().
SelvaFlux co-discovered this sink and, with colleagues, was the first to publish and size it.
A potent greenhouse gas, removed by a forest, and now measurable. Measuring it is what makes it possible to size the benefit, and in time to price it.
Climate benefit and creditable today
How Big Is the Forest’s Methane Work?
There are two answers here, and they are not the same. As climate benefit, the methane work is worth about 19%. As credits a registry will issue today, about 4%.
on top of the forest’s biomass-carbon benefit (range 10 to 40% by growth rate, higher for slow-growing forest). The near-term cooling the bark delivers.
of the forest’s biomass-carbon credits (range 2 to 9%). What a registry will credit under today’s rules. This is the basis for revenue.
Where 19% comes from: methane uptake of about 2.15tonnes CO₂-warming- equivalent per hectare per year, against biomass growth of about 11.6tonnes CO₂ per hectare per year. Sources: for uptake, Cook-Patton Nature 2020 for biomass, for GWP*. We do not add the two together, and we do not swap one for the other.
The Gap Is the Work
That gap, roughly 15 points between what the forest does and what the market pays for, is climate value that no ledger records. Closing it, by making a measured forest service legible to the market, is what SelvaFlux does.
As crediting catches up to the science, the credited share should rise toward the climate benefit. If a methane-appropriate metric is adopted into the methodology, the creditable figure could move above today’s 4%. We are working toward that. We are not promising it, and we will always quote today’s approved number first.
At the scale of a country
The Full Climate Value of National Forests
The same measurement scales up. From satellites, we can quantify forest methane uptake across a whole jurisdiction, not just a single project. For a government, that is a more complete picture of what its standing forests are worth to the climate, and a stronger evidentiary case for protecting them. We design these as partnerships with national forest institutions and climate funders, and we contribute the methods to the open scientific record.
To be clear about what this is: bark methane uptake is a natural service the forest already provides. It is reportable for completeness in a national inventory, and it is not a carbon credit, an offset, or a license to emit. The value is a fuller account of why these forests are worth keeping standing.
For governments and jurisdictionsThe wider picture
The First Piece We Can Measure
A living forest cools the climate, holds biodiversity, makes its own rain, and builds soil, and the market prices almost none of it. That is part of why forests are often worth more cleared than standing. Methane is the first of those services we can measure and credit. It will not be the last.
Everything else the forest doesThis is climate impact backed by direct measurement and published science. If you back that, this is early.
For the business case, what this means for a forest project’s revenue, the homepage has the developer story.
References
Where the Numbers Come From
- Forest methane uptakeGauci, V. et al. (2024). Global atmospheric methane uptake by upland tree woody surfaces. Nature.DOI
- Methane warming potency (GWP*, 128× over 20 yr)Lynch, J., Cain, M., Pierrehumbert, R. & Allen, M. (2020). Demonstrating GWP*: a means of reporting warming-equivalent emissions. Environmental Research Letters 15(4), 044023.DOI
- Credited basis (GWP100, ~28×)IPCC (2013). Climate Change 2013: The Physical Science Basis, Working Group I (AR5), Chapter 8.Report
- Forest biomass growthCook-Patton, S. C. et al. (2020). Mapping carbon accumulation potential from global natural forest regrowth. Nature 585, 545-550.DOI