BLOUNTSTOWN, Fla. — As the 2025 hurricane season rolls into its first month, most Floridians are busy boarding up windows and stocking up on supplies. But a quieter kind of preparation is happening deep in Florida’s forests—where trees, not tarps, are being counted and protected as part of a growing movement to use nature itself as a storm defense.
One of the major players is Aurora Sustainable Lands, a private land management company that oversees 1.7 million acres of forest across the U.S., including a 40,000-acre stretch along Florida’s Apalachicola River Basin.
WATCH: What do carbon credits have to do with hurricanes?
“What we know is that trees work. It's the oldest, most cost-effective carbon removal tool we have out here,” says Cakey Worthington, a vice president at Aurora.
Aurora isn’t preserving trees for aesthetics or recreation—they’re in the carbon credit business. Their teams of foresters and ecologists are cataloging trees, calculating how much carbon each absorbs, and selling that environmental benefit in the form of carbon credits to major corporations.
“As you can see from some of the examples out here, not every tree is in perfect form,” said Katie Krejsa, another expert with Aurora. “We enter this data into equations that calculate how much carbon is in a tree.”
In a recent deal, Microsoft purchased 4.8 million carbon removal credits tied to 425,000 acres of Aurora-managed forest—part of the tech giant’s broader strategy to offset emissions and meet sustainability goals.
But what do carbon credits have to do with hurricanes?
“More trees protected means stemming climate change impacts—like increasingly severe weather,” Worthington explained. “Our forests help keep the water moving at a slower rate... it also helps buffer it coming into the communities as well.”
In other words, trees act like organic flood walls. Their roots absorb stormwater, filter runoff, and reduce flood damage. A 2020 study published in 'Nature' found that mangroves alone reduce property damage by $65 billion annually, protecting over 15 million people globally.
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“Trees got out of R&D from a technological development standpoint millennia ago,” says Worthington. “And we're capturing that here.”
Still, not everyone is sold on the carbon market approach. While carbon offsetting has become a billion-dollar industry, critics argue it can sometimes act as a "get-out-of-jail-free card" for polluters—allowing them to continue emitting greenhouse gases while purchasing credits instead of making real reductions.
Some studies have also questioned the reliability of forest carbon accounting, particularly when it comes to long-term permanence—if a forest burns or is illegally logged, the sequestered carbon could be released, voiding the offset.
Aurora says their goal is long-term preservation, not just profit.
“We're here as land managers and forest owners to do what we can to help that changing environment,” Worthington says.
Whether as carbon sinks, storm buffers, or biodiversity reservoirs, trees are doing a lot of heavy lifting this hurricane season— you just might not have realized it.
