Guest Editorial
Reforesting Scotland Summer 2004 issue [check if published
yet]
Tree planting - no morning-after pill for fossil fuel excesses
Can tree-planting “neutralise” the climate damage caused by the
extravagant emissions of an industrialised world hooked on fossil
fuels? Over the past few years, the idea has found a large
following. Show-biz celebrities, development institutions and
even financial institutions like the World Bank, which has
pledged to “offset” all emissions caused by its staff on mission
around the world, hail tree-planting as the win-win-win solution
to global warming.
The idea is simple: we pay someone else somewhere else to cover
their land with trees that will soak up the carbon dioxide
released through our emissions from that bargain weekend shopping
trip to New York, that splashy CD release, or that big corporate
conference. We can go on guzzling fossil fuels and the climate is
no worse off than if we left them buried in the ground. And who
could object to planting trees?
Well, I do – at least in this case. This greenwash scheme reminds
me of my grandma’s warning: “If the deal sounds too good to be
true, it probably is”. So what’s wrong, then, with using trees
to soak up greenhouse gases? In brief, this: offset forestry
confuses fossil carbon with biological carbon. It claims that X
amount of emissions from burned oil, gas or coal can be
considered as equal to Y amount of biological carbon in a tree.
For example, companies like Future Forests, a carbon marketing
firm, says that it can tell me exactly how many trees someone
somewhere will have to plant and look after for 99 years to soak
up the emissions from my round-trip to, say, Beijing.
But what if “my” tree dies prematurely, releasing most of the
carbon it was meant to keep locked away from the atmosphere?
Proponents of offset forestry assure me they can calculate the
odds of this and insure against it. Yet scientific dispute is
rife about whether one can predict over the next century, or even
over the next few decades, the carbon fluxes of the complex
ecosystems of which trees are a part. Will someone be monitoring
the carbon performance of “my” tree and whatever backup carbon
sponge is put in place during the entire next century of
increasingly aberrant storms, droughts, heat waves and chemical
changes in the atmosphere?
Cambridge University landscape historian Oliver Rackham has the
right perspective on this fantasy: “[f]or its practical effect,
telling people to plant trees is like telling them to drink more
water to keep down rising sea-levels.” And even if the fantasy
had some basis in science, dealing with just the increased carbon
dioxide emissions we face over the next half century would
require completely covering Europe – from the Atlantic to the
Ural mountains – with trees. To soak up the UK’s annual
greenhouse gas emissions, one would need to plant an area the
size of Devon and Cornwall every year – and look after them
forever. And the next year another area of that size would need
to be covered, and the next…
But carbon offset forestry’s troubles don’t end there. There is
another question: Is “my” carbon-absorbing tree in fact mine at
all? Several years ago the Norwegian-based organisation, Future
in Our Hands, researched tree planting offset projects in Uganda
and Tanzania. They came to the conclusion that offset forestry
was a new form of colonialism, under which Northern companies and
affluent citizens claim new lands simply to “undo” damage caused
by our fossil fuel addiction. Already, monoculture plantations
aimed at soaking up carbon released in industrialised countries
are taking over and damaging the lands people need to live on in
Brazil, Ecuador, Uganda and Tanzania.
Closer to home, tree planting charities are also getting the
short end of the stick. Future Forests, for example, passes on to
tree-planters only a small fraction of the fee it pockets from
the clients it claims to be making “carbon-neutral”: only 12
pence out of each six pounds collected, according to The Observer
(28 April 2002). Twelve pence, of course, is nowhere near enough
to plant and preserve a tree for 99 years.
Where does that leave us? With the sobering yet unavoidable
recognition that, wonderful as trees are, they are not the magic
potion which will allow us to go on mining and burning fossil
fuels. Carbon ‘offset’ projects may salve our consciousness but
they won’t solve the problem. The only way of slowing global
warming is to kick our fossil fuel addiction and make drastic
reductions in greenhouse gas emissions.
Jutta Kill works for SinksWatch, and initiative to track and
scrutinize carbon sink projects. Contact SinksWatch, 1c Fosseway
Business Centre, Stratford Road, Moreton-in-Marsh,
Gloucestershire GL56 9NQ T: 01608 652 895 or E: jutta@fern.org or
visit www.sinkswatch.org