GreenTrees, America's first and largest forest carbon origination pipeline, is the first forestry project to be approved by the American Carbon Registry (ACR).

ACR's approval indicates that, pending successful third-party verification, the GreenTrees project will be listed on the Registry and able to transact high-quality forest carbon offsets with significant environmental co-benefits.

Early this year GreenTrees became the first commercial greenhouse gas offset investment by Duke Energy.

"The focus of GreenTrees is to create a win-win for the private landowner, the environment and the economy. It enables private landowners to benefit from helping us establish a verifiable carbon offset market in the United States to address climate change, while also creating conservation and wildlife benefits along with bio-economic development opportunities for the Mississippi Alluvial Valley," said Carey Crane, founding partner of GreenTrees.

The GreenTrees program aims to reforest at least one million acres in the Mississippi Alluvial Valley, the nation's largest watershed, covering approximately 25 million acres in Louisiana, Mississippi, Arkansas, Kentucky, Tennessee, Missouri and Illinois. A significant amount of its farmland is considered marginally productive, with the planting of trees potentially the highest and best use of much of this land.

GreenTree's specific planting methodology will accelerate and improve hardwood forest growth in this region.

"Afforestation is not the work of rich men and women but those rich in spirit whose belief that the resurrection of the native ecosystem delivers a dividend far greater than the monetary value of carbon," added Chandler Van Voorhis, founding partner of GreenTrees.

"Approval by the American Carbon Registry sets the stage to deliver the highest quality premium forestry credit from America's 'Ark of Biodiversity' --- the Mississippi Alluvial Valley.

As the United States' first private carbon registry, and in 2008 the most widely used, the American Carbon Registry demonstrates the unique blend of environmental integrity with operational fluency," said Nicholas Martin, Chief Technical Officer of the American Carbon Registry.

"We are pleased and excited to have GreenTrees, a program recognized nationally for its innovation and conservation impact, as our first approved forest carbon project," said Van Voorhis. "GreenTrees' approach to environmental integrity and maximum conservation impact underscores our own values in building the carbon marketplace. With Version 2.0 of the ACR Forest Carbon Project Standard to be released shortly, we look forward to further innovation in forest carbon projects from GreenTrees and others."