Carbon Footprints

Photo courtesy of Forests NSW of an actual carbon pool

I had a long discussion yesterday with a member of the press about the work we do at Carbon Planet. She was very confused about carbon offsetting and carbon credits, assuming they were one and the same thing. But they are not. Carbon offsetting is the utterly unregulated set of activities that purports to swap the CO₂ emissions you generate with CO₂ absorption, or displacement. Carbon credits are a highly regulated medium of exchange used for carbon offsetting. Projects that generate formally accredited carbon credits are very heavily scrutinised and regulated, and are the most reliable mechanism for carbon offsetting.

Let me cite a concrete example; Carbon Planet provides carbon offset services for our clients by retailing carbon credits. One of the main types of carbon credit we retail are Forestry NGACs. We also retail plenty of other types of carbon credits but let’s just stick to the Forestry NGACs for now so we can compare apples to apples.

The NGAC scheme is one of the most regulated and carefully overseen carbon credit schemes in the world. When you buy a Forestry NGAC from Carbon Planet you can be 100% certain that your money is funding projects that remove at least 1000Kg of CO₂ from the atmosphere and store it on your behalf for 100 years. The Forestry NGACs are generated by the physical act of reforesting huge tracts of land in New South Wales, land that was cleared prior to 1990 and would not have been reforested if not for the NGAC scheme.

By comparison there are plenty of other companies, both in Australia and elsewhere, who claim to provide carbon offset services by funding ad-hoc tree-planting schemes. These schemes are by-and-large unregulated and subject to the whims of individual farmers and tree planters. If you put your money into ad-hoc tree planting schemes you have no idea how long those trees might last, where they might be planted, or what might happen to them even in the short to mid-term future.

I am a big fan of trees. They remove CO₂ from the air, they provide homes for animals, prevent soil erosion, act as wind-breaks, provide a renewable building resource for people and self-replicate. But its very important to see the forests for the trees. Forests, by means of huge numbers, can do things small copses of trees can not do. For a start by acting in parallel they absorb CO₂ at a terrific rate, countering the argument that trees themselves take a very long time to absorb the emissions of say a flight, or car use. But forests are self-regenerating. That’s the miracle of using living things to do your work for you. They reproduce by themselves. Ad-hoc tree plantings on the other hand require much more human intervention for them to reproduce. Forests are hives of bio-diversity, small scale tree-plantings can lead to mono-crops with all of the consequent risks and dangers.

When you are choosing an offset scheme to remove CO₂ from the atmosphere you need to look for the schemes with formal accreditation, and you need to ensure that when you put your money down you actually get something for that money. Most carbon offsetters simply take your money and promise to do something nice with that money. They offer no actual proof that your money is going anywhere except their own pockets. You need to get more than just a fancy printed certificate for your cash. Carbon Planet ensures 100% transparency by transferring the legal ownership of the carbon credits is sells to you via the independent greenhouse-gas registry. When you buy carbon credits from us you get an account with a government backed registry in your name, with your own password, so you can log in to their web-interface and see that the credits you have paid for have been transferred to you. This eliminates any possibility that we might be selling the same carbon credits over and over again.

So to sum up

1. Carbon Credits are a means for Carbon Offsetting and are not one and the same thing.
   1. Carbon Credit schemes are very heavily regulated,
   2. Offsetting without formal carbon credits is entirely unregulated and you run the risk of blowing your cash.
2. Forests are different to trees.
   1. With forests you get safety in numbers,
   2. Forests absorb huge volumes of CO₂ very quickly,
   3. Forests reproduce and grow with minimal human intervention,
   4. Forests last forever, trees have a limited life-span.
3. Forestry carbon credits are the most secure way of removing CO₂ from the atmosphere

So why, you might ask, are forestry projects so looked-down on by green groups like the WWF and Greenpeace? I had a lengthy chat with representatives of both the WWF and Greenpeace and none of them could explain it. But I suspect that they are simply tarring all forestry projects with the same brush, lumping in properly managed and highly scrutinised forestry carbon credit schemes with fly-by-night tree planing schemes. — DS

Technorati Tags: carbon credits, carbon offsetting, Carbon Planet, climate change, emissions reduction, emissions trading, forests, global warming, Greenpeace, NGAC, trees, WWF

This entry was posted on Friday, May 25th, 2007 at 8:44 am and is filed under The Carbon Economy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.