Otway Silva 2025_1

Otway Silva 2025_1 is a plantation forestry project located approximately 35km south-west of Colac in the Corangamite region of Victoria. It was registered in October 2024 and covers an initial area of 2,173.55 hectares.

Plantation forestry projects involve establishing, maintaining, or converting plantation forests to sequester carbon while managing the land for commercial timber harvesting. Standard requirements for this methodology dictate that the plantation must be managed according to standard commercial forestry practices to achieve specific forest cover parameters, relying on carbon modelling tools like FullCAM to estimate carbon storage over a nominated 25-year permanence period.

The Corangamite and Otway region is known for dairy farming, grazing, and significant commercial forestry operations. The area benefits from a high-rainfall climate, and local soils are generally Chromosols (loam over clay) and Vertosols (cracking clays associated with volcanic basalt plains).

This project sequesters carbon by establishing and maintaining a new plantation forest for the commercial harvesting of wood products. The project proponent, Otway Silva Pty Limited, is an Australian subsidiary of the global Munich Reinsurance Company, with Midway Plantations Pty Ltd acting as the project agent. Notably, the project has seen rapid expansion since registration; between June and November 2025, multiple area variations were submitted to continually add new parcels of land to the operation's footprint.