DO TREE PLANTATIONS OFFSET FOSSIL FUELS?
XYZ Corporation has purchased carbon offsets to compensate for their carbon dioxide releases. Often they will do it for you too- pay to have someone somewhere "plant a tree" or a thousand trees or a hundred thousand trees, in order to go on with business as usual. The internet abounds with web sites that will help you calculate how many trees you need to pay for in order to do penace for your carbon-intensive lifestyle – at up to $5.50 per tree. So is it really that easy? No need to conserve or make radical changes, just pay someone somewhere a hefty sum for planting a few trees? Here's what forest campaigner Jutta Kill of the European environmental group FERN thinks of the concept.
1. Carbon in trees is temporary:
Trees provide temporary carbon storage as part of the normal cycle of carbon exchange between forests andthe atmosphere. Trees can easily release carbon into the atmosphere through fire, disease, climatic changes, natural decay and timber harvesting.
2. One-way road:
The release of fossil carbon, in contrast, is permanent and, over relevant time scales, will accelerate climate change by increasing the overall amount of carbon in the atmosphere – the very cause of today's climate change. Fossil fuels such as coal, oil and gas are locked away and their carbon is only released when humans dig up and burn them for energy. Once released, they become part of the active carbon pool, disrupting the natural cycle.
3. Fake credit:
Carbon credits from tree planting are based on the claim that carbon stored temporarily in tree plantations can justify permanent releases of fossil carbon into the atmosphere without any harm to the climate.
4. Big foot:
Carbon credits from tree planting increase the ecological debt of the global North. The more fossil fuels a northern country consumes, the more land it is entitled to use to "offset" its emissions. This is unfair and increases the already high ecological footprint of the North.
5. Subsidies for mega-plantations:
Carbon credits from tree planting stand to provide a new subsidy for the plantations industry. Large-scale plantations have a long list of negative impacts on forests and forest peoples, and often exacerbate local land disputes and violence.
6. Communities suffer twice:
First, climate change affects the livelihoods of forest peoples and rural communities through increased droughts, floods, forest fires, and deforestation. Second, carbon credits from tree planting promote the expansion of large-scale tree plantations, which indigenous peoples and forest-dependent communities oppose in many parts of the world.
7. Ticking time bomb:
Avoiding climate change requires drastic reductions of greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuels. Offsets, however, allow emissions to continue under the false premise that they've been "neutralized." This just masks the real crisis and sentences future generations to live with fewer choices and worse conditions.
8. Forest fraud:
Forests play a vital role in storing carbon and buffering extreme weather events. But linking forest restoration with carbon credits is a dead-end for forest peoples as well as for the climate. Halting the forest crisis requires action against the underlying causes of deforestation, not more fossil carbon in the atmosphere and more monoculture tree plantations occupying land needed by local communities.
9. Blind guess:
Measuring carbon in forests is fraught with uncertainties. Scientists have found that estimates of the carbon balance in Canadian forests could vary by 1,000 per cent if seemingly small factors, such as increased levels of atmospheric CO2, are taken into account.
10. Phony climate fix:
Real and lasting solutions to the forest crisis and the climate crisis lie in providing incentives for forest-dependent communities and indigenous peoples to restore their forests and practice sustainable forest management. Small-scale pilot projects are already showing positive results, while large-scale carbon sink projects are attracting criticism and protest.
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For more info, visit: http://www.sinkswatch.org and http://www.fern.org
[Watershed Sentinel, Jan/Feb, 2007]