Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour presented the 2009 Innovator Award from the Southern Growth Policies board to Chandler Van Vooris, Managing Partner at C21, who manages the Green Trees program.

The Green Trees initiative started in 2004 to create a public/private business model to restore hardwood forests. Rather than purchase land and place it in easements, C21 would recruit private capital for the emerging demand of carbon commodities and biomass supplies and use it to provide landowners with economic incentives to enroll and lease their land for forests that would create carbon and biomass supplies.

In this way, landowners receive new innovative ways to increase their financial returns by planting restored hardwood forests and Virginia benefits by creating bio-economic development infrastructure and supply chains on a regional scale to serve the rapidly growing need for renewable energy supplies from woody biomass.

One initiative from each of Southern Growth's 13-member states was recognized with an award at Southern Growth's annual conference in Research Triangle Park in North Carolina.