Larry Lohmann, The Corner House, England, UK
A powerful argument has emerged that ecological restoration schemes should beware of offering greenwash to polluters by accepting cash for carbon sequestration, because ‘carbon-neutrality’ claims are unverifiable, perhaps even fraudulent.
Over the past decade, the idea that planting a certain number of trees can make the world safe for continuing fossil fuel emissions has proved irresistible to much of the concerned public.
Heavy industries and energy companies want to find ways to avoid making the cuts in carbon dioxide emissions being pushed on them by new climate legislation and public opinion. Forestry and plantation companies hope to be able to sell them the means of doing so. Commodity exchanges and trading firms are enthusiastic about the profits to be made by getting the two sides together. Consultants, too, are looking to make money out of offering advice on carbon liabilities and ‘carbon sequestration’ projects.
Small wonder that The Economist magazine stated a few years ago without argument or evidence, as if it were an obvious truth, that planting trees is an alternative means “of achieving a stated goal (fewer net emissions) at lowest cost”. Small wonder, too, that this assumption was built into the Kyoto Protocol. The belief is both attractive and reassuring.
Taking advantage of this belief, private companies such as UK-based Future Forests have recently been promising to make consumers’ polluting activities ‘carbon-neutral’ by planting trees for them. Such companies’ client lists include big names like BP, Barclays, Volvo, Avis, Amerada Hess, Fiat, Orange, Warner Brothers and even celebrities like Coldplay and Atomic Kitten.
What is more, much of the money is going into tree-planting by extremely worthy organisations such as wildlife trusts, local councils, community forests and forest trusts from Scotland to California, in addition to private forestry firms.
Unfortunately, however, the premise underlying the schemes is scientifically mistaken. Planting a given amount of trees cannot be verified to have the same climatic effects as reducing fossil fuel emissions by a given amount and, climatically speaking, the two cannot be traded for each other.
That is not to say that the climate will not benefit from more forest conservation and restoration. It will. But there is a difference between simply planting trees and planting trees as part of a programme that licenses further fossil fuel burning.
The transfer of the world’s remaining hydrocarbon deposits to the combustion chamber has to stop if climate change is to be addressed. With or without more trees, the earth’s above-ground carbon-cycling capacity is simply incapable of handling the carbon that could still be mined from coal and oil deposits. Launching schemes that sanction industry to keep digging up that carbon is the last thing the climate needs.
As Heidi Bachram of Carbon Trade Watch notes, “we need to see constructive actions such as a halt to government subsidies for oil development, rather than scientifically disreputable schemes to ‘compensate’ for continued fossil fuel exploitation, which merely leave an ever-worsening problem for future generations”.
“Pretending that a tonne of carbon stored in trees is the same as a tonne of fossil carbon ignores the very basics of the natural carbon cycle,” adds Jutta Kill, co-ordinator of SinksWatch, an organisation that monitors tree-planting projects claiming to ‘neutralise’ greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuels. “There is enormous scientific controversy about how much carbon dioxide any given tree-planting can take out of the air, and for how long.” The International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis has stated flatly that, due to scientific ignorance and uncertainty, “we cannot compare the effectiveness of fossil fuel with land-use change and forestry activities with respect to reduced emissions”.
Seven environmental groups, including Kill’s and Bachram’s, launched protests in May against Future Forests and Climate Care, another UK firm that claims to be able to make its clients’ products and services ‘carbon-neutral’ through tree-planting and other activities. The environmental groups have sent letters to 200 of the firms’ clients asking them to reconsider their association with the companies, and have lodged formal complaints with Britain’s Advertising Standards Authority about their claims.
The environmentalists’ protests create a difficult dilemma for other conservationists and forest lovers who have been rejoicing in this new source of funding for valuable forest restoration projects. Should they continue taking money for so-called ‘emissions offset’ plantings even though, by doing so, they are making global warming worse: a development that threatens, in the long term, the very forests they want to protect?
Firms such as Future Forests have no real defence against the scientific arguments that tree-planting cannot be equated with keeping fossil fuels in the ground. But they insist that their tree-planting programmes do educate companies and individuals about climate change and encourage them to avoid or reduce fossil fuel use.
But environmentalist critics argue that these claims, too, are false. They note that such programmes are likely only to give the private sector incentives to delay or avoid the technological, social and lifestyle changes required to combat climate change.
www.sinkswatch.org
www.cdmwatch.org
www.tni.org/ctw
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