Courtesy of G: The Green Lifestyle Magazine
As the celebs will attest, planting trees is one of the most popular ways of removing the gas that's up there already. "When you fly from here to London," says Dave Sag, co-founder of South Australia-based offsetter Carbon Planet, "you're putting emissions into the atmosphere, so you need to do something that will remove emissions from the atmosphere." Sag's company acts as an intermediary, arranging to plant trees for customers in the forests of New South Wales.
Non-profit Victorian offset organisation Greenfleet concentrates on neutralising vehicle emissions, and has planted a total of more than two million native trees of various species in every Australian state except Tasmania. Some forestry offset initiatives rely on "monoculture" plantations made up of a single fast-growing species to sequester carbon. According to Greenfleet, though, planting a mixture of native species is important because it creates complete ecosystems that increase biodiversity, provide habitats for wildlife, and improve water quality, beyond just hoovering up carbon.
The big catch with forest carbon sequestration is that plantations only remove carbon gradually. Trees capture carbon over the course of their lives, so it can take 40 years or more for a tree to reach its full storage or sequestration potential. This is a problem because experts think that to fight climate change effectively we need strategies that remove carbon right now, rather than in the future.
And at the end of its life, when a tree dies and decomposes, a lot of that carbon re-enters the atmosphere until another tree grows up to re-capture it. "So you've got to commit that land forever for 40 years of uptake" or the captured carbon is lost, says Ian Jones, an expert in climate science from the University of Sydney.
In addition, planting forests reduces the amount of land available for agriculture. And a body of scientific evidence suggests that, when planted outside the tropics (especially in the temperate regions of the northern hemisphere), such plantations may actually contribute to global warming rather than fighting it. A forest canopy is darker than bare ground and so absorbs more heat, making the Earth warmer in spite of the reduction in carbon loads.
Ben Pearson, an energy campaigner for Greenpeace Australia, cautions against tree offsets. "The problems with carbon sequestration ... are just huge," he says. "We strongly encourage people not to be involved in schemes that use trees to sequester carbon. Look for ones that invest money in renewable energy such as wind farms."
Renewable energy offsets reflect a different approach to reducing the global carbon load. Rather than sucking up the carbon that's already in the atmosphere, they invest money in projects that reduce the amount of carbon being emitted in the first place. But don't confuse renewable energy offsets with the Green Power you buy for your home (for more information on Green Power, see G1, p44).
While the two often come from the same clean energy projects, Green Power directly replaces coal-fired electricity with the renewable kind, whereas offsets compensate for carbon generated through other activities (such as travel) by producing additional renewable energy and pumping it into the grid, thereby displacing coal-derived energy and preventing CO2 emissions.
Renewable energy projects that produce offsets include solar and wind farms, as well as bio-fuel plantations, landfill gas capture, geothermal and biomass initiatives. The beauty of renewable energy offsets is that "if you buy a renewable energy credit today from a wind farm that's actually on the ground today, it's actually saving a tonne of CO2 from going up into the atmosphere today, and that means that the atmosphere actually has less CO2 in it," says Climate Friendly's Joel Fleming.
Be that as it may, Courtney Hayes, the managing director of WA's Elementree, is standing by his company's policy of planting of eucalypts, acacias, and other native species. "Reduction is critical, but even if everyone on Earth completely stopped emitting tomorrow, the globe would still unavoidably warm." Hayes says natural systems like forests are the only way we know of to remove the carbon dioxide that has already been emitted. They also help to rehabilitate land that is degraded.
Offset online
Soak up carbon with carbon sequestration offset providers such as:
Reduce carbons being released with these (primarily) renewable energy offset providers:
Courtesy of G Magazine
