About the fund
The EKO Green Carbon Fund (GCF) was a demonstration fund. GCF’s strategy was to invest in the development of carbon offsets, primarily from land-based carbon sequestration projects (which may have included forestry, agricultural change and other land-use change projects) in the United States. The GCF had a “Parallel Fund” which invested alongside the GCF. The Parallel Fund distributed carbon offsets in kind to investors as opposed to delivering financial returns. The bulk of the investments in the portfolio were Improved Forest Management projects that generated carbon offset credits for the California Air Resource Board cap-and-trade program.
One of the most important investments by the GCF is an investment in the development of a project with the White Mountain Apache Tribe (WMAT). The project is an Improved Forest Management (IFM) project covering 89,000 acres on the Fort Apache Indian Reservation in Arizona. IFM projects seek to protect existing forestland, which both reduces carbon emissions from timber harvesting activity and sequesters carbon out of the atmosphere. Such projects also improve biodiversity and water quality. The WMAT IFM project is the GCF’s largest investment and is expected to produce over 3,500,000 California Carbon Offsets, making it one the largest forest carbon projects in the U.S. While we are pleased with the financial return that it will generate, we are particularly pleased with the environmental impact it will have in securing greenhouse gases from the atmosphere and the extraordinarily positive impact it will have on the White Mountain Apache Tribe, a tribe that has been challenged with extremely high unemployment and poverty.
The David and Lucile Packard Foundation
