Green group stumped by lack of land for its trees
There’s an interesting article in today’s Sydney Morning Herald, Green group stumped by lack of land for its trees.
Greenfleet, one of the nation’s leading organisations helping individuals and companies offset carbon emissions, has for nearly three years been unable to find enough NSW land to plant the trees its subscribers have paid for.
This story highlights the dangers of putting your money into groups who’s operations lack transparency. What have Greenfleet’s customers actually been buying for their money? The simple answer seems to be a promise and nothing more. When you pay good money to offset your car’s emissions you need to know that those emissions are being offset. A big part of the problem here is that Greenfleet are operating outside of any established regulatory framework. If, instead of taking people’s money in exchange for a promise to plant some trees, they had sought accreditation under the NSW Government’s NGAC scheme, then customers would have solid guarantees about the environmental benefits they were paying for. But not actually performing the tree-planting people were paying for is just the start of it:
In Queensland, a new property owner refused to recognise an agreement between his predecessor and Greenfleet. He bulldozed 20,000 trees, which then had to be replanted elsewhere.
In comparison, Carbon Planet retails carbon credits, a medium of exchange for carbon sequestration and storage. These carbon credits, formally known as NGACs, or New South Wales Greenhouse gas Abatement Certificates, certify that a tonne of CO2 has been removed from the air and will be stored for 100 years. In particular we retail forestry NGACs which also stipulate that they must have been generated in land that was cleared prior to 1990, and that, should anything happen to the forests, such as fire, or theft, or disease, then the NSW Government must replace them.
When you buy our NGACs you are not buying trees, but a carbon sequestration and storage service, certified by carbon credits created by the NSW Government. And further, when you buy them from Carbon Planet we actually transfer legal ownership of those credits to you via the government’s own Greenhouse Gas Registry. Some of the people we talk to ask us why that’s important. Greefleet’s current problems should be answer enough. If you run a company, or large organisation, you can’t just give money away in return for hollow promises. You need audited, reliable information and some record in your asset registry that you’ve actually done what you have paid to do. Operations such as Greenfleet, in my opinion, give the whole carbon offset industry a bad name. And that’s bad for the whole planet. — DS
Technorati Tags: business, climate change, emissions reduction, emissions trading, forests, global warming, Greenfleet, greenwash, NGAC, NSW
