New Jersey faces rising climate risks—but without better land-sector GHG accounting, it could miss its climate targets. A new project to enhance the state’s natural and working lands GHG inventory is helping ensure that doesn’t happen.

In April 2025, a wildfire scorched 15,000 acres in New Jersey’s Pine Barrens. We’re not accustomed to seeing this kind of headline describe the Garden State, but it’s becoming a potential new reality in our climate-impacted world. 

New Jersey has emerged as a significant subnational climate actor among U.S. states, and state climate action plays a crucial role in meeting national and global climate targets. These entities are on the front lines of climate impacts and are best positioned to implement policies related to both mitigation and adaptation to climate change. 

In recent years, New Jersey has rejoined the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, set a 100% clean energy goal by 2035—including one of the nation’s most ambitious offshore wind targets—and introduced strong incentives for electric vehicles. It also passed a groundbreaking Environmental Justice Law aimed at protecting vulnerable communities. Underpinning these efforts is a bold commitment: to slash greenhouse gas emissions 80% below 2006 levels by 2050.

While energy and transportation dominate headlines, the land sector in New Jersey also plays an important role in the state’s climate strategy, as it faces significant risks from sea-level rise, flooding, and coastal erosion. From Hurricane Sandy in 2012—the most destructive and deadliest storm in New Jersey’s history—to the recent Jones Road Fire in 2025—the largest wildfire in the state in nearly two decades—the impacts and destruction are exacerbated by conditions associated with climate change, and the risk is on an upward trajectory. 

To integrate the land sector into the state’s climate agenda, the Department of Environmental Protection, in collaboration with the Department of Agriculture, developed and published a report titled “A Strategy to Advance Carbon Sequestration on New Jersey’s Natural and Working Lands,” which proposes targets for carbon removal for each land use category, including forests, wetlands, croplands, aquatic habitats, and developed land. The targets encompass numerous activities and priorities that are expected to contribute to mitigation goals while also enhancing the resilience of these ecosystems and providing other environmental, social, and economic benefits. 

Yet turning policy into progress is no small feat. Many of the state’s targets are framed around specific activities, such as improving forest management on 200,000 acres or reducing wetland soil disturbance by 30% by 2050. All these activities need to be linked to parameters that have an impact on the emissions and removals of carbon—and tracked over time to assess the extent to which these actions contribute to the state’s GHG reduction targets. GHG inventories show big-picture trends, even if they can’t measure every tree planted. Information in the inventory can be broken down by land types, carbon pools, and other land-based emission sources to inform implementation priorities and course-correct as needed. 

“New Jersey is taking major steps toward limiting its carbon emissions in order to reduce its contributions to global climate change. One key element in achieving these goals is carbon accounting. With recent technological advancements and the availability of data sources, New Jersey needed an enhanced carbon accounting methodology.” – Kirk Raper, Research Scientist at NJDEP (New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection)

This is where the Greenhouse Gas Management Institute (GHGMI) and our partners at Silvestrum Climate Associates step in. We are assisting the New Jersey GHG inventory team in refining and enhancing the methodology and data used to estimate GHG emissions and removals, and establishing processes that enable the team to collaboratively and transparently improve the inventory. An essential component of inventorying emissions and removals from the land sector is the full accounting of land use and land use change occurring in the state. New Jersey has one of the most detailed land use datasets, dating back to 1986—a rare asset among U.S. states. This kind of activity data is the very first element of an inventory.

We’re collaborating with the New Jersey inventory team, as well as other in-state stakeholders, to identify and apply relevant datasets and determine emission parameters. We’re also helping New Jersey align its methodology with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) guidelines and the US GHG inventory, leveraging existing resources and expertise to facilitate potential comparisons. The final results of this project include improved GHG estimates for the land sector, a manual documenting methodological steps and improvements, and a calculation tool that the inventory team can use in the future to improve estimates and synthesize results.

Crucially, the work is not just about numbers on a page. Our technical approach also emphasizes capacity building to ensure sustainable knowledge transfer and skill development, enabling the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection (NJDEP) staff to compile ongoing inventory data. The goal of our approach is to develop, with NJDEP staff, the data collection processes, methods, tools, and skills that consistently produce transparent, accurate, complete, and comparable (Transparency, Accuracy, Completeness, Consistency, and Comparability [TACCC] – IPCC GHG inventory quality principles) inventory estimates. 

“New Jersey is working to enhance our ability to quantify land as a source or sink of carbon within the State. In helping us to build calculation tools for this purpose, GHGMI has exhibited professionalism and responsiveness, and has worked closely with our team to ensure that DEP’s needs are met on this project.” – Dr. Daniel Clark, Research Scientist at NJDEP

To that end, the project activities also include online and in-person trainings that put New Jersey staff on the path to fully integrating the land sector into the state’s climate agenda. Without proper land-based accounting, New Jersey could fall short of its climate goals despite achieving major policy wins. With billions at stake in infrastructure and insurance, better land-sector data isn’t a nice-to-have—it’s essential to inform policy decisions and enable New Jersey to address challenges associated with climate change impacts.