Planting millions of trees is no morning-after pill for industry’s carbon excesses, argues Jutta Kill
Can
tree-planting ‘neutralize’ the climate damage caused by the emissions
of an industrialized world? Over the past few years, the idea has found
a large following. Show biz celebrities, companies, development
institutions and even the World Bank, which has pledged to ‘offset’ all
emissions caused by its staff on missions around the world, hail
tree-planting as the 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 or that
big corporate conference. 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 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. Carbon marketing firms say they 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 up? Proponents of offset forestry assure me they
can calculate the odds of this and insure against it. Will someone be
monitoring the carbon performance of ‘my’ tree during the next century
of increasingly aberrant storms, droughts and heat waves?
Landscape
historian Oliver Rackham has the right perspective: ‘For its practical
effect, telling people to plant trees is like telling them to drink
more water to keep down rising sea levels.’ 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 it forever. And the next year
another area that size would need to be covered, and the next…
Carbon
offset forestry’s troubles don’t end there. Is ‘my’ carbon-absorbing
tree in fact mine at all? Offset forestry is a new form of colonialism
under which Northern companies claim new lands to ‘undo’ damage caused
by fossil fuel.
Trees are no magic potion. The only way of slowing global warming is to make drastic reductions in greenhouse gas emissions.
Jutta Kill works for SinksWatch, an initiative to track and scrutinize carbon sink projects
