Chestnut Carbon backed by Kimmeridge completed its largest US tree-planting operation to date, planting nearly 24mn trees November-April. The move doubles its footprint to nearly 70,000 acres, bringing total planting to almost 50mn since 2022. Its sustainable restoration project spans 1.5 times Acadia National Park and five times Manhattan, across nine states including Georgia, South Carolina, and Tennessee. The planting includes fire-tolerant shortleaf pines and longleaf pines, a species previously wiped out by logging.

Chestnut is a major supplier of carbon removal credits, having signed one of the largest afforestation, reforestation, and revegetation offtake agreements with Microsoft in January 2025. The deal spans 25 years and will deliver more than 7mn tonnes of carbon removal credits. However, CEO Ben Dell says demand for carbon credits is spreading beyond Microsoft to banks, consultancies, retailers, and industrial players, which are "getting increasingly sophisticated" about buying credits.

The recent round of planting was supported by a first-of-its-kind bank financing, in which Chestnut received a $210mn non-recourse project finance credit facility from lenders including JPMorgan, CoBank, and Bank of Montreal. However, Dell says there aren't enough "high-quality" carbon removal credits in the market, and the industry is struggling to keep pace with the emissions impact of the AI boom due to weak pricing. Earlier this month, BloombergNEF reported that Microsoft had paused future carbon removal purchases, accounting for 93% of all purchases in 2025. Dell says whether the industry can counter this depends on whether other companies and industries commit to carbon removal.