Stockdale Park Carbon Project

Stockdale Park Carbon Project is a plantation forestry project located at multiple aggregated sites across Victoria, with its namesake area situated near Stockdale, approximately 25km north of Stratford. It was registered in August 2023 and covers 2,622.25 ha. The project coordinates map to widespread properties distributed across several Victorian local government areas, including Wellington, Pyrenees, Colac Otway, Corangamite, Latrobe, Towong, and the Southern Grampians. These regions are well-regarded for commercial forestry operations, as well as dairy farming, livestock grazing, and broadacre cropping.

Plantation forestry projects involve establishing new plantation forests or converting existing short-rotation plantations to long-rotation forests for the commercial harvesting of wood products. Standard methodology requirements dictate that the forest must be actively managed for commercial timber, maintaining a commercially viable stocking density appropriate for the target species (typically around 800-1000 stems per hectare for commercial pine or eucalypt) and following standard silvicultural practices.

Because the project aggregates land across diverse geographic zones, from the southwest to the northeast of Victoria, the environmental conditions vary. However, the sites predominantly fall within Victoria's temperate, moderate to high rainfall classifications (averaging 600mm to over 1000mm annually), which are ideal for sustained timber growth. Soil profiles across these diverse locations range from volcanic basalts and fertile clay loams in the southwest, to sandy loams and podzolic soils in the Gippsland and northeast regions.

This project sequesters carbon through both the establishment of new plantation forests and the conversion of short-rotation harvesting models to long-rotation systems. An interesting feature of this project is the proponent's ongoing aggregation strategy; Hancock Victorian Plantations (HVP) Pty Limited, one of the state's largest timber plantation operators, has continually varied the project to add new plantation areas almost monthly throughout 2024, 2025, and into early 2026.