We’ve waded through the jargon to give you a snapshot understanding of a carbon acronym that you can digest over a morning coffee.
What does forest management plan, or ‘FMP’, mean to you? Surely forests have managed themselves quite well for the past 400 million years!?
Well, in the context of carbon farming, a forest management plan explains how you’ll run your project to comply with the ACCU Scheme’s Plantation Forestry Methodology. FMPs need to include:
- A permanence plan, explaining how you’ll keep your plantation alive and compliant for the 25- or 100-year permanence period to protect the carbon sequestered by your project
- Records and evidence of all the management actions undertaken for the current rotation and planned actions for the remainder of your project
- Details of any changes to the management regime since the previous reporting period
- Information about any growth interruptions (natural or otherwise) that have occurred
- Details about how your project is modelled in the Australian Government’s FullCAM tool (check out our FullCAM explainer here).
Throughout the project, you’ll need to update the FMP:
- Before each offsets report
- If you’re planning to change the management regime
- When you’ve implemented a management action
- When a disturbance event (e.g. a fire or drought) has occurred.
Plantation projects registered under Schedules 2, 3 and 4 have additional FMP requirements, which you can read in detail here.
The FMP must be reviewed and signed off by a ‘qualified and independent person’ – you can search for a local Registered Forestry Professional at the Forestry Australia website.
When your FMP will need to be submitted depends on the Schedule under which your project is registered:
Source: Clean Energy Regulator
The CFF has assisted many plantation operators and landholders to develop forest management plans for their projects. For help with your project, or to find out whether a plantation project would work for your property, contact us today.
