By backing the American Forest Foundation's climate project, Netflix is pinning its hopes on large-scale forest carbon schemes, supporting a bold 15-year plan to turn tracts of unused US land into forest.
American Forest Foundation (AFF) has signed a 15-year agreement with Netflix under which the streaming giant commits to buying verified carbon credits from the AFF's Fields&Forests (F&F) programme. It is the largest initiative of its kind, one that will turn unused land in the southern United States into green, productive forest.
“The partnership with Netflix shows what is possible when business and conservation join forces,” said John Ringer, director of the AFF's project finance and environmental markets department. “With the right investment and the backing of science, natural climate solutions can be both an effective and a dependable instrument for tackling the most important and most pressing conservation problems. We are grateful to Netflix for taking the initiative and we urge other companies to follow this example by investing in projects built on new ideas (approaches) that support communities across America's regions and family-owned forests.”
The American Forest Foundation was founded in 1981 and works with private forest owners across the country to improve the condition and productivity of the forests they own through sustainable management methods. The F&F programme is aimed at owners of small parcels of land, who until now have been shut out of the voluntary carbon market by high up-front costs and the complexity of the process. AFF has removed these barriers by covering all land preparation and tree planting costs, providing technical support and making annual payments under 30-year contracts.
So far the programme covers family-owned holdings totalling more than 1,000 hectares. The aim is to reach 30,350 hectares by 2032 and a carbon credit volume worth roughly 4.8 million USD. The Netflix investment will help deliver the first phase of the programme across 2,430 hectares and speed up its roll-out in the southern United States. The company provided the critically important start-up funding through an advance payment, tying that early finance to the project's key milestones.
*Netflix is an American subscription video on demand over-the-top streaming service. It mainly distributes original and acquired films and television shows across a range of genres and is available internationally in a number of languages.
Netflix was created in 2007, almost ten years after Netflix, Inc. launched its pioneering DVD-by-post film rental service. Netflix is the most subscribed video on demand streaming media service, with 301.6 million paying subscribers in more than 190 countries in 2025. By 2022, “Netflix Original” productions made up half of its library in the United States, and the company of the same name had moved into other categories, such as video game publishing in the form of mobile games delivered through its main service. In 2025 Netflix is the 18th most visited website in the world, with 21.18% of its traffic coming from the United States, followed by the United Kingdom on 6.01%, Canada on 4.94% and Brazil on 4.24%.