Researcher Ben Shamgochian of Our Climate Common worked with the New England Forestry Foundation to identify and protect the oldest trees in Maine, like this 150-foot white pine, and preserve their carbon storage capacity. John Hagan/Our Climate Common

The U.S. Forest Service awarded $17 million Wednesday to help private and tribal landowners in Maine protect their forests from climate change by promoting practices that increase the forestland’s capacity to store heat-trapping carbon emissions.

The grants are part of $335 million in Inflation Reduction Act funds set aside Wednesday to incentivize private forest conservation and sustainability projects by U.S. Department of Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack, whose agency oversees the U.S. Forest Service.

“Forests provide innumerable benefits to people and communities, and private forestlands make up more than half of all forests in the U.S.,” Vilsack said in a statement. “We are helping to provide the resources private forest landowners need to keep working forests working.”

Forests cover 89% of Maine and play a crucial role in the state’s effort to offset heat-trapping carbon emissions and become carbon neutral by 2045. The state’s forests absorb atmospheric carbon through photosynthesis and store 412 million metric tons of carbon in the trees and a whopping 1.6 billion metric tons of carbon in their soils.

The biggest share of local funding will go to the Maine Department of Agriculture, Conservation and Forestry, which will get $5 million to subsidize forest stewardship practices with carbon storage benefits that most private forest owners can’t afford under current market conditions.

The program will enroll 400 landowners, including at least 160 deemed as underserved by the state.

The New England Forestry Foundation and Climate Common will receive $4.3 million to work with landowners to help protect Maine’s oldest forests by deferring timber harvesting for up to 10 years while working toward permanent protection through carbon markets or conservation funding.

“This is a singular opportunity to protect highly valuable, ecologically rare, and carbon-dense late successional old growth forests,” Executive Director Ryan Owens said in a statement. “It also will allow us to fund landowners and foresters to practice forestry that mitigates climate change, improves forest productivity and improves wildlife habitat, so this is a win-win-win.”

The forestry foundation will provide payments to landowners to undertake climate-smart forestry practices on younger forests to accelerate the development of long-lived, sustainable wood products, he said, to ensure the conservation efforts don’t disrupt the New England wood supply or shift harvesting to other regions.

Maine DACF will get another $4 million grant to create a financial incentives program to promote invasive species management, forest stand improvement and forest regeneration across Maine’s large swath of privately owned, non-industrial forestland.

Penobscot Nation will get a $1.7 million grant to help it enter the carbon markets, paying for a market study, a forest inventory, a feasibility study on potential uses and markets for low-value timber and the development of a tribal forester training program that will be needed for market participation.

The forestry foundation will also share a $2 million grant used to help tribes enter the green building markets in North Carolina, Tennessee and Virginia, the Pacific Northwest, and the six New England states, including Maine.