IvyCo creates products to empower individuals to fight climate change with their everyday purchases. By connecting to an individual’s bank accounts through secure Open Banking technology, IvyCo analyzes spending patterns to help users understand their largest areas of climate impact. More than just educating about carbon intensive spending, IvyCo lets users round up their spare change to fund decarbonization efforts, including the FFCP. These micro-transaction round ups lead to a significant impact over time—every $11 raised for the FFCP leads to improved management of an acre of family-owned forests.

With ownership over the largest share of U.S. forests—36%—families and individuals are critical to maximizing the climate potential of our nation’s forests, which are the second-largest potential natural climate solution in the U.S. The FFCP aims to help family forest landowners to mitigate as much as 80 million tons of CO2e each and every year. That would be the equivalent of taking 18 million cars off the road or shuttering 20 coal-fired power plants.

Individual consumers have historically had a difficult time navigating carbon markets, as highlighted by the Task Force on Scaling Voluntary Carbon Markets. Introducing the FFCP to IvyCo users provides an ideal opportunity to streamline and credibly involve IvyCo users in a key climate solution. Since IvyCo continually provides analysis and insights back to our users, there are regular opportunities to update and educate them about family forest owners and what it means to manage forests sustainably. By focusing on sharing landowner stories and program progress, IvyCo will make more personal the abstract nature of climate solutions.

In the same way, IvyCo helps individual consumers navigate carbon markets, the FFCP enables small forest owners to access the same markets as carbon credit producers. Historically, less than 1% of the acres in forest carbon projects were on small ownerships (between 20 and 1,000 acres), the size range of the majority of family forest properties. FFCP enables these smaller landowners to participate through an innovative program design and new methodology that removes much of the cost barriers to the landowner.

Incredible climate benefits can be achieved through scaling IvyCo and AFF’s partnership. U.S. forests and forest products currently neutralize 15% of the United States’ annual carbon emissions. More importantly, studies suggest this could be nearly doubled with the right actions. Protecting and enhancing this critical carbon sink requires involving family-owned forests, since they make up the largest percentage of US forest ownership groups. Similarly massive in impact, households are responsible for 60% of global greenhouse gas emissions, and household spending is responsible for 70% of the US economy. If 100,000 Americans used IvyCo to round up just $10 per month - equivalent to just 0.17% of median household income - it would enable adding 1 million acres of family forest land to the FFCP per year. That’s an area a bit larger than Rhode Island.

Working together, the FFCP and IvyCo create a full lifecycle of aggregation from consumers to family forest landowners. To learn more about the partnership, visit IvyCo’s website.