Meta and Microsoft have entered into long-term agreements to purchase carbon credits from a forestry project in Washington State’s Olympic Peninsula. These deals aim to support climate-smart forest management practices and contribute to the companies’ sustainability goals.
A Forest with a Mission
The project aims to shift 68,000 acres of forestland on the Olympic Peninsula to climate-smart management. This area near Olympic National Park is managed by EFM. It is supported by Climate Asset Management (CAM), a partnership of HSBC Asset Management and Pollination.
The initiative focuses on Improved Forest Management (IFM) practices. These include:
- Lengthening tree rotation periods,
- Reducing logging impact, and
- Promoting selective harvesting.
These methods aim to increase carbon storage, enhance biodiversity, and support local communities. James Bullen, Head of Asset Management at CAM, remarked:
“Blending timber income, conservation easements, and carbon credits can simultaneously de-risk and enhance returns…The Olympic Rainforest shows how corporates can mobilize capital at scale for high-integrity climate outcomes that complement, not replace, emissions reductions.”
For Microsoft and Meta, this initiative is a move forward for their carbon reduction and climate goals. Together, they’ll purchase almost 1.4 million carbon credits from the said reforestation project.
Meta’s Commitment to Net-Zero Emissions
Meta, the parent company of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, is working toward an ambitious climate target: to achieve net-zero emissions across its entire value chain by 2030. This means the company plans to cut greenhouse gas emissions from not only its operations, such as data centers and offices, but also from its suppliers and users’ activities, referred to as Scope 3 emissions, shown below.
Meta GHG Emissions 2023
To meet this goal, Meta is focusing on energy efficiency, renewable energy, and carbon removal. As of 2020, Meta has already achieved net-zero emissions for its own operations and runs all its global facilities on 100% renewable energy. However, its larger challenge lies in addressing emissions from suppliers, product use, and transportation—areas that are harder to control directly.
The company’s recent 10-year agreement with EFM, which will provide 676,000 nature-based carbon removal credits by 2035, is part of its broader climate strategy. These credits will help offset unavoidable emissions while supporting reforestation and biodiversity restoration.
Meta also supports other high-quality carbon removal projects, such as direct air capture and soil carbon storage. By investing in nature-based solutions, Meta aims to balance its environmental impact while setting a strong example for digital platforms worldwide.
Microsoft’s Path to Becoming Carbon Negative
Microsoft has set one of the boldest climate goals in the tech sector: to become carbon negative by 2030. This means that the company plans not only to reduce its own emissions but also to remove more carbon from the atmosphere than it emits.
In addition, by 2050, Microsoft aims to remove all the carbon it has emitted either directly or through electricity use since it was founded in 1975.
To achieve this, Microsoft is taking a three-part approach: reducing its emissions, removing carbon through innovative solutions, and supporting high-integrity carbon offset projects.
As part of this strategy, Microsoft signed a multi-year agreement with EFM to purchase up to 700,000 carbon removal credits from the Olympic Rainforest project. These credits come from improved forest management practices that help store more carbon and support local ecosystems.
Beyond this agreement, Microsoft has committed $1 billion to its Climate Innovation Fund. This fund invests in early-stage technologies and nature-based solutions like reforestation, soil carbon enhancement, and ocean-based removal.
One of its key investments includes EFM Fund IV, which aims to raise $300 million for climate-smart forestry across the U.S. With this investment, Microsoft could access an additional 2.3 million carbon credits—further strengthening its long-term carbon removal portfolio and advancing global climate solutions.
Why Forests Matter for Climate Action
Forests play a critical role in fighting climate change. They act as carbon sinks, meaning they absorb more carbon dioxide (CO₂) from the atmosphere than they release. Trees store this carbon in their trunks, branches, leaves, and roots. When forests are managed well, they can remove large amounts of CO₂ every year, helping to slow global warming.
Globally, forests absorb about one-third of the CO₂ released from burning fossil fuels each year. That makes them one of the most effective natural tools we have for reducing greenhouse gases. Projects like the Olympic Rainforest help by stopping deforestation. They also remove CO₂ by boosting forest growth and restoring land.
Forests become very useful when managed with “climate-smart” practices. These practices balance carbon removal, conservation, and sustainable timber use.
As major companies like Meta and Microsoft and governments seek to meet climate targets, forestry-based carbon removal is gaining more attention. High-quality forest carbon credits can be a reliable part of long-term climate plans. This is true when they are monitored and verified correctly. That’s why big companies are putting money into nature-based solutions.
The latest market data shows that credits generated by IFM projects are getting more interest and value from corporations. Their trading volume increased three times as seen below.
Benefits of Climate-Smart Forestry
The project’s climate-smart forestry practices are expected to deliver multiple benefits:
- Carbon Removal. Over one million tonnes of carbon emissions are projected to be removed over the next decade.
- Biodiversity Enhancement. The project aims to restore habitats for endangered species and support wild salmon restoration.
- Community Engagement. Partnerships with the Quileute and Hoh locals focus on wildlife restoration and cultural harvesting.
- Economic Opportunities. The initiative supports sustainable timber growth and creates diverse, healthy habitats for wildlife and recreation.
Carbon Credits Get a Corporate Upgrade
These long-term carbon credit agreements reflect a shift in corporate procurement strategies. Companies are moving from spot carbon credit purchases to long-term offtake agreements, signaling a new era where carbon credits serve as strategic assets. This approach provides price certainty and supports the development of high-integrity carbon markets.
Climate Asset Management, managing over $1 billion in investor commitments, illustrates this evolution through its Natural Capital Fund and Nature-Based Carbon Fund. These funds offer exposure to real-asset carbon strategies that combine financial returns with measurable climate, biodiversity, and community impacts.
Meta and Microsoft’s long-term carbon credit deals with the Olympic Rainforest project represent significant steps toward their respective climate goals. By investing in climate-smart forestry practices, these companies are contributing to carbon removal efforts, biodiversity conservation, and community engagement. These agreements also highlight the growing importance of high-integrity carbon credits in corporate sustainability strategies.
The post Meta and Microsoft Secured Long-Term Carbon Credit Deals to Support Olympic Rainforest appeared first on Carbon Credits.
Most businesses that decide to act on their net-zero targets reach the same point of friction. Buying carbon credits has meant tracking down brokers, sitting through sales calls, and requesting a quote just to learn a price, sometimes with limited proof of what you are buying.
The earnings calls that quietly reframed climate from sustainability question to operating risk.
Three earnings calls in the last 18 months tell the story without any help from a press release.
Hershey, May 2024: cocoa price exposure compresses margin, and the company attributes part of the cost shock to West African weather. Olam, July 2024: coffee climate exposure quantified in the annual report. JBS, January 2025: supply chain climate disclosures expanded materially in response to investor pressure and regulatory expectation. None of these companies issued the announcement as climate news. They issued it as financial news. The climate-linked supply chain risk did not arrive with a sustainability framing; it arrived as a P&L line.
You are probably reading this article because you suspect the same thing is happening to your business. This piece walks through what is showing up on which earnings calls, how procurement and finance leaders are quantifying the exposure, and what serious corporates are doing about it before the regulator asks.
Where climate risk has already appeared in earnings
The pattern is consistent across resource-intensive sectors. A weather event compresses supply, the price spikes, the cost flows through the income statement, and the analyst on the call asks whether the event is anomalous or structural. Increasingly, the honest answer is the second one.
Cocoa is the cleanest example. The 2023 to 2024 West African harvest fell sharply on the back of erratic rainfall and disease. Cocoa futures more than tripled. Companies with concentrated West African sourcing absorbed the cost; companies with diversified sourcing absorbed less. The exposure was not climate as ESG topic. It was climate as cost of goods.
Coffee follows the same pattern. Brazilian and Vietnamese harvests have moved on weather more sharply across the last several seasons. Roasters with long-tenor supplier relationships and origin diversification have managed the volatility; roasters with spot-market exposure have not. Wheat, sugar, palm oil, beef: the same dynamic in different commodities, a pattern the IPCC AR6 Working Group II report projects will intensify across agricultural systems through mid-century.
What this means: climate risk is no longer a footnote in the 10-K. It is a line item the CFO has to explain on the call.
The three commodity exposures that hit margin first
For most companies with material Scope 3 exposure, three exposures dominate the near-term P&L risk.
- Concentrated single-origin sourcing in a climate-vulnerable region. If your tier-one supply for any material commodity sits in one geography, you have a concentration risk that climate amplifies. Diversification across origins is the obvious hedge, but it takes years to build and requires relationships you cannot acquire by tender.
- Supplier financial fragility under climate stress. Smallholder farmers, who supply a large share of the global cocoa, coffee, and palm oil market, do not carry the balance sheets to absorb yield shocks. When yields collapse, they exit. When they exit, your supply base shrinks, and the surviving suppliers raise prices. The risk is structural, not cyclical.
- Logistics and storage exposure to extreme weather. Hurricane disruptions to Gulf shipping, drought-driven Panama Canal restrictions, flooding in European inland waterways: each of these has moved input costs in the last three years, a pattern documented in Munich Re’s natural catastrophe data. The exposure shows up as a one-quarter event in the financial press but accumulates over time on the cost line.
TCFD and ISSB disclosure changes
The disclosure architecture has now caught up with the risk. The Task Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosures, whose recommendations are now embedded in the ISSB’s IFRS S2 climate standard, requires companies to disclose climate-related risks across physical and transition categories, with quantification where possible.
For physical risk specifically (the climate-linked supply chain risk you are reading about), the disclosure must address both acute exposures (extreme weather events) and chronic exposures (gradual changes in temperature, precipitation, and growing seasons). The disclosure must address the time horizon over which the risk is material, the parts of the value chain exposed, and the financial impact under different scenarios.
The CSRD imposes similar requirements under European law, with double materiality (both financial and impact materiality) embedded in the assessment. The practical effect: your auditors and your investor relations team now need a defensible answer to the climate-linked supply chain risk question, and the answer needs to be quantified.
What procurement and finance can do now
Three actions matter near-term.
Map your exposure. Most companies do not have a clear view of which tier-one and tier-two suppliers sit in which climate-vulnerable geographies. Without the map, you cannot quantify the risk, and without the quantification, you cannot disclose it credibly. The map is the foundation, and World Resources Institute climate risk research provides useful public tooling to start.
Diversify and deepen, in that order. Diversification across origins reduces concentration risk, but the deeper move is to invest in the resilience of the suppliers you already have. Regenerative practices, agroforestry, soil health interventions: these reduce yield volatility under climate stress and protect your input cost trajectory.
Embed the climate spend inside procurement, not outside it. Treating climate risk as a sustainability cost line subordinates it to the ESG budget. Treating it as a procurement and resilience investment puts it in the budget that matters, which is the cost-of-goods budget that the CFO defends quarterly.
Nature-based supply chain investments are the asset class designed for exactly this purpose. They sit inside the value chain, they reduce climate-linked supply risk, they generate verifiable Scope 3 reductions, and they produce the documentation an auditor and a regulator can both test.
If you are quantifying climate-linked supply chain risk in advance of the next earnings cycle or the next disclosure period, the carbon and sustainability experts at Carbon Credit Capital can help you map your exposure and structure a Dual-Value Model response that addresses reduction, resilience, and disclosure-readiness in a single program. Schedule a consultation.
More and more small and medium-sized businesses are hearing the same question from their larger customers: What is your carbon footprint? That question now travels down entire supply chains, and it arrives next to tender requirements, certification criteria, and rising customer expectations.
-
Climate Change1 year ago
Guest post: Why China is still building new coal – and when it might stop
-
Greenhouse Gases2 years ago嘉宾来稿：满足中国增长的用电需求 光伏加储能“比新建煤电更实惠”
-
Greenhouse Gases1 year ago
Guest post: Why China is still building new coal – and when it might stop
-
Climate Change2 years ago嘉宾来稿：满足中国增长的用电需求 光伏加储能“比新建煤电更实惠”
-
Climate Change2 years ago
Bill Discounting Climate Change in Florida’s Energy Policy Awaits DeSantis’ Approval
-
Renewable Energy11 months agoSending Progressive Philanthropist George Soros to Prison?
-
Greenhouse Gases1 year ago
嘉宾来稿：探究火山喷发如何影响气候预测
-
Carbon Footprint2 years agoUS SEC’s Climate Disclosure Rules Spur Renewed Interest in Carbon Credits