Along Highway 65 on the Nett Lake sector of the Bois Forte reservation, just south of the Canadian border, the forest runs to tall red and white pine and blue spruce. Lance Hill is the realty manager for the Bois Forte Band of Ojibwe, and a citizen of the band. He has watched it buy back land the Bois Forte band lost more than a century ago.
“It hit a lot of positive notes with the band,” Hill said. “Yes, we finally get to get our land back.”
He turns his car down Palmquist Road, and the forest changes. Stands of younger, leafier aspen and birch grow back fast on ground that was logged hard for decades.
That younger forest is doing something unusual. It is helping to buy back the land it grows on.
In 2022, the Bois Forte Band of Ojibwe reacquired about 28,000 acres inside its own northern Minnesota reservation, land it had lost more than a century ago to federal allotment and tax forfeiture. By the band’s account, it is the largest tribal land return in the United States. The band could not afford to buy it outright. So, it turned to carbon offsets as a way to generate revenue.
As a forest grows, it pulls carbon dioxide out of the air and stores it in wood and soil. A company that wants to offset its own emissions can pay for that stored carbon, one credit for every metric ton. Bois Forte will let most of these acres grow, sell credits for the carbon they hold, and use the money to pay off the loan it took to buy the land back. It has enrolled 22,000 of the 28,000 acres in the project.
The National Indian Carbon Coalition helped guide the project and calls it a model for tribal nations across the country. It is also an early test of a new method built to fix the flaws that have dogged carbon offsets, and one of the first times a large landowner has put that method to work.
For many in the band, it was hard to accept. When Hill and others explained that Bois Forte would get 28,000 acres back at no cost to its members, some people struggled to believe it.
“There was a lot of distrust,” Hill said. “When they hear pieces like we’re going to give you back 28,000 acres, and it does not cost anything, that almost sounds too good to be true. They were like, I got to see it.”
More than a carbon offset
The National Indian Carbon Coalition, a Native-led nonprofit that helps tribes build carbon projects on their own land, has been working with Bois Forte for the past several years. The coalition is a program of the Indian Land Tenure Foundation, the organization that helped the Bois Forte band finance the purchase of the land through its lending arm.
Bryan Van Stippen leads the National Indian Carbon Coalition. He says carbon offsets are a means, not an end.
“We talk about the carbon markets and ecosystem markets as a tool in the tool chest,” Van Stippen said. “Our mission at the Indian Land Tenure Foundation is Indian lands in the Indian hands. That's what we're trying to do.”
For Hill, the return is about far more than money.
“When you bring a lot of land back, it’s going to make people feel good,” Hill said. “Because we can practice our ways. We got more space to do it.”
The parcels that make up the band’s carbon offset project are scattered throughout the Nett Lake watershed, where the band harvests wild rice, or manoomin, central to its culture and diet.
Hill said letting the forest grow protects the water the rice depends on and restores habitat for the animals the community hunts. The band chose to track moose, wild rice and pink lady slipper flowers as an added measure of the project's health.
For now, Hill says the plan is mostly to let the forest rest. The band's carbon plan calls for letting forest stands grow rather than harvesting them, stepping in only when fire, pests or invasive species require it. Prescribed burning is part of the design, a way to restore a natural fire cycle and reduce the buildup of fuel that could feed a larger wildfire.
The Bois Forte band’s carbon offset project has a duration of 40 years. The band expects to repay the loan it took to buy the land in about 20 years, using carbon revenue. Because a fire or an insect outbreak could release some of the stored carbon, the project sets aside a share of its credits as insurance.
A market that has drawn doubts
While the land return is complete, the carbon science behind it is far less certain in a market that has drawn years of criticism.
Investigations and academic studies have found that many forest carbon offsets don't deliver the climate benefit they promise. Some projects were credited for protecting forests that were never in danger. Others claimed to store carbon that later burned. The criticism has been broad enough that the industry has spent the past several years trying to rebuild trust.
Whether the climate benefit is real is a harder question, and the answer depends on how the stored carbon gets counted.
One of the biggest doubts about carbon credits involves a concept researchers call additionality. Grayson Badgley is a research scientist who studies carbon offsets at the climate nonprofit CarbonPlan.
Grayson Badgley is a researcher scientist with the nonprofit CarbonPlan. Photo Courtesy of Grayson Badgley. Photo courtesy of Grayson Badgley “You don’t want to pay somebody to not chop down trees that they were never going to chop down anyway,” Badgley said.
He says a carbon offset is sort of like draining a bathtub while the faucet is still on.
“What we’re doing with offsets is we’re basically trying to make that drain to be a little bit larger, and so if that doesn't actually happen, the water just keeps on rising, and in the end, we still got ourselves a bit of a problem,” Badgley said.
A new method for counting stored carbon
The Bois Forte project runs under a newer method, designed by the carbon registry Verra to answer earlier criticisms. Older projects set their own baseline, each one essentially predicting how much logging it was preventing.
The method, called VM0045, doesn't let a project grade itself. Instead of a fixed prediction, it uses what is known as a dynamic baseline, comparing the project against real, similar forests elsewhere, measured over time by the U.S. Forest Service, to see whether the protected land stores more carbon than comparable woodlands that aren't enrolled.
An independent body set up to certify credit quality has approved the method as one that meets its standards. Approval means the method is sound on paper. Whether it holds up in a real forest is a separate question.
“Dynamic baselines are a step in the right direction,” said Badgley. “But they're not a silver bullet.”
Everything depends on honest comparisons, Badgley said. Match a lightly managed forest against intensively logged ones, and it will look like it is storing extra carbon when it is only different. He said it's still early.
“We’ve really only had a chance to see the starts of projects,” Badgley said.
Bois Forte is among the first large landowner projects to use the new method, and its credits haven't reached the market yet.
Would the land have been saved from logging anyway?
The credits depend on an assumption about what would have happened to this land without the project. The project is built on the premise that without it, these forested acres would have continued to be logged. If the forest was already headed for protection, the companies that purchase these credits, and their customers, are buying a promise to save trees that were not in danger.
In 2020, the timber company PotlatchDeltic sold these acres not to another logging operation but to The Conservation Fund. In a news release at the time, the nonprofit pledged to keep the land “forested and sustainably managed as working timberlands.”
By the time Bois Forte acquired it, the land had already passed out of the timber company's hands and into conservation ownership.
PotlatchDeltic described the sale as part of a long-planned withdrawal from Minnesota meant to "maximize shareholder value through rural real estate sales." The company called the land "ideal for conservation."
From the seller's side, these acres were being steered away from timber, not toward it.
Asked about the sale, Van Stippen said the outcome was never certain.
In an email to MPR News, Van Stippen said the timber giant “could have just as easily sold this land to another timber company.” Without the carbon financing, Van Stippen added that the Bois Forte band might not have secured the land before it slipped back into other hands.
One conversation at a time
The band built a working group across its departments, held open houses, ran a public comment period, convened its elders, and reserved the right to refuse buyers it doesn't want, including any fossil fuel producer. Any final decisions rest with the tribe’s elected officials. Even the big conservation groups involved, Van Stippen said, are kept in their place.
Their role, Van Stippen said, is to “stand outside the tribal council room” while the band decides. “You do not run the show,” he said. “The tribe runs the show.”
Researcher Grayson Badgley does not dismiss projects like the one at Bois Forte. For him, the best way to think about most forest offsets, he said, is not as cancelling a company’s emissions but as something closer to a donation.
“I want there to be trees in my local community,” he said. “That's better than nothing, but it doesn't actually cancel out my emissions.” The forests are worth protecting, he said. They may just not carry the precise climate guarantee the market promises.
For Hill, the project was never really about carbon. He talks about distrust, land loss and about eventual repair.
“One conversation at a time,” Hill said, “goes a long way to recover that trust.”
This story comes from the Upper Midwest Newsroom, a public media collaboration between Wisconsin Public Radio, South Dakota Public Broadcasting, Prairie Public in North Dakota and Minnesota Public Radio News made possible by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.
The Upper Midwest Newsroom is a public media collaboration between Wisconsin, North and South Dakota, and Minnesota, made possible by the Cooperation for Public Broadcasting.
