Entergy Verifies Impact of Reforestation Work

Entergy Corp. of New Orleans announced Tuesday that it has registered its Arkansas and Louisiana reforestation project with the nonprofit American Carbon Registry.

The project involved restoring 2,942 acres of marginal agricultural land to native bottomland hardwood forests to remove an estimated 460,000 tons of carbon dioxide from the environment over 40 years.

In Arkansas, 378 acres were reforested in 2009. The acreage was on the Overflow National Wildlife Refuge in Ashley County and on the Pond Creed National Wildlife Refuge in Sevier County.

The U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service owns and oversees the reforested land.

Entergy paid $90,000 to register with the American Carbon Registry to verify with scientific methodology the carbon dioxide reduction.

Bottomland hardwood forests are forested wetlands that originally covered more than 30 million acres in the lower Mississippi valley. Logging destroyed most of these forests in the in the early 1900s.  

As part of the project, Entergy paid for some plots of land, the new trees, tree planting, development plant, survival assessment and registration with the American Carbon Registry. Among Entergy’s partners on the project were The Conservation Fund in Arlington, Va., The Trust for Public Land in San Francisco, Calif., and TerraCarbon of Peoria, Ill.

"The reforestation project partnership we’ve used here represents an innovative market-based approach to help slow and reduce the buildup of greenhouse gases," said Steve Tullos, Entergy’s manager of corporate environmental initiatives.