Oregon Public Broadcasting

The overseer of the U.S. Forest Service told an overflow crowd of environmentalists and rural landowners that environmental policy will include local carbon markets around the country.

Mark Rey is the Undersecretary of Natural Resources in the U.S. Department of Agriculture. He spoke to more than 100 people at the Western Stewardship Summit in Sunriver.

Mark Rey: “The development of private markets for ecosystem services, whether it's carbon credits, water quality credits, habitat credits is an important future development. I believe within the next five years we’ll be trading those kinds of credits on markets just as we trade other commodities. Hopefully we’ll do a better job in not screwing the markets up.”

The idea behind these markets is that rural landowners could be paid for preserving their land on an open market. Farmers could get money in return for promising not to grow crops, or loggers could be paid not to log forests.

Others at the summit agreed that carbon markets could develop over the next few years. But some environmentalists expressed skepticism of the idea coming from an official within the current administration.

Before his work with the administration, Rey worked in the forest products industry in the Northwest.