In the world of procurement with purpose, trees are going to be big in 2022.
As everyone remembers from school biology lessons, trees (and all plants) take carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and release oxygen. Which is pretty useful, given it is the opposite to how animals work. All part of the amazing balance of life on earth.
But now carbon dioxide is a major source of global warming, the scope for plants – and trees in particular – to play an even greater role in the move towards “net zero” carbon has really got public attention. So the potential to both reduce deforestation and plant more trees is now big news, and big business. After all, who could possibly argue against the idea of planting millions, maybe even billions, more trees that will help mitigate the impact of emissions from industry, travel and our day to day lives.
However, and without wishing to be a party-pooper, a few notes of caution are needed.
The first set of issues relate to the idea of using tree planting (or reducing tree destruction) to offset carbon emissions. For example, you might personally pay for trees to be planted to offset the carbon produced by your flight to the Alps for a skiing holiday. At a corporate level, a firm might buy forestry-related offsets to set against their factory or other emissions – indeed, airlines are looking to do this to offset the inevitable emissions from their core activities.
Now many of the smaller schemes that market offset options to individuals focus on planting actual trees. But some of the larger offset schemes work on the basis that the money paid by emitters goes to support stopping or reducing deforestation. Here (via link) is a typical scheme from Ecologi which appears to be well thought-out and structured.
And this is what British Airways promotes. (I believe the firm pays some offsets itself and also offers travellers the option of offsetting their ”own” emissions).
“This project protects the last great rainforest of Asia, located in the Cardamom mountains in south-west Cambodia. Rainforest once covered south-east and south Asia but only 5% remains, and this precious biodiverse region is now particularly vulnerable due to an exponential increase in illegal land grabbing resulting from increased land prices.
The project focus is on climate change mitigation, biodiversity protection and the creation of alternative, sustainable livelihoods for local communities. This includes support for local rangers in policing the forest, local training, education programmes and wildlife rehabilitation. All of this contributes to the preservation of an important natural habitat, a crucial global carbon sink and multiple endangered species”.
However, as the popularity of offsets of this type has grown, so have the doubts about its true effectiveness. In some cases, such as a scheme to help Brazil nut growers in Peru preserve the rainforest, developers and project managers seem to have gained financially but the end result was negligible in terms of real carbon benefits. This report by campaign group foodwatch Germany concluded that millions of carbon offset credits bought by companies were created “through manipulation of carbon accounting in order to profit the project developer, rather than generating any genuine additional carbon emission reductions”.
There is also the fundamental issue of tracking the benefits when it is about something that did not happen (i.e. trees weren’t chopped down). The problem is establishing the “counter-factual” - knowing what deforestation would have been if a particular offset project had not happened.
A wider study last year of how these schemes calculate carbon savings by Unearthed and the Guardian, with SourceMaterial, found evidence that raises doubts about the ability of projects to offset emissions in line with the claims of major airlines and other buyers of credits. The sort of issues they highlighted included;
· Verification of what has – or has not – actually happened on the ground.
· How to ensure the uniqueness of “your” offsets and avoid the dangers of “double counting”.
· How do you obtain a meaningful counter-factual against which you can assess the projects’ performance? And some deforestation might be acceptable – e.g. to build a major road that might improve economic conditions and reduce the need for subsistence farmers to clear forest.
· Or deforestation might have not happened anyway, independent of the porject intervention - perhaps because of changes in government policy or agricultural practice?
· What happens after the specific project finishes? Will those trees be chopped down anyway? Or will the land owner come back for more money in a few years’ time in order to agree not to chop the forest down again? And again…?
For me, the most fundamental problem is that whilst offsets might be helping to avoid harm, some are not actually contributing “new” carbon reduction to the system. It is a bit like the famous “cost avoidance” metrics we see in procurement savings reports – “we saved money by stopping the CIO buying a stupid new piece of tech that they didn’t really need”. That might be a good thing to do, but it is not really a “saving”, I’d argue, and it doesn’t show up on the bottom line. If a landowner chops down 180,000 hectares in 2022, but “saves” 20,000 because of offset payments received, the world has not reduced overall net emissions.
United Airlines’ own CEO, Scott Kirby, has called offsetting “a fig leaf for a CEO to… pretend that they’ve done the right thing for sustainability when they haven’t made one bit of difference in the real world”.
So can we make offsets of this nature work better – and what about planting new trees? Let’s leave that discussion for part 2…