It all started with
Sting, this fad for owning one's very own patch of tropical rainforest,
though it is probably unfair to blame him entirely for creating the
boom industry that buying up forests piecemeal has become.
It is 20 years since the musician first set foot in Brazil and pledged
to fight the cause of the Yanomami Indians, setting up the Rainforest
Foundation to protect forests and their indigenous inhabitants.
Today, protecting forests has acquired a more international purpose.
Climate change, rather than assuring the livelihoods of local people,
has become the issue. Celebrities and politicians, and many others just
in search of a quick buck, are falling over each other to advocate
plant-a-tree conservationism as a salve to global warming.
Sienna Miller, Tony Blair, Josh Hartnett, Desmond Tutu and Prince
Charles all endorse Global Cool, an initiative that encourages
individuals to reduce their carbon emissions by, among other things,
buying a "tonne of cool". David Cameron has proudly owned up to
offsetting any flights he takes by making a donation to Climate Care,
which calculates the cost of the carbon your flight has pumped out and
does good stuff, like planting trees, to right the wrong. Sir David
Attenborough is a patron of the World Land Trust, which is currently
offering to "save a whole acre in perpetuity", for just £50.
However, critics say that there can be no ultimate guarantee of the
future of any piece of land.
The wealthy financier Johan Eliasch, who advises Gordon Brown on
deforestation and green energy, provoked the ire of the Brazilian
government with his purchase, in 2006, of 400,000 acres of Amazon
rainforest. "The Amazon is not for sale," said the Brazilian President,
Lula da Silva. Eliasch then joined forces with Frank Field MP, and
launched a grand tree-buying plan called Cool Earth late last year.
Cool Earth stresses that it "leases" rather than buys land, to keep it
safe from eager logging companies. Its website explains that saving one
acre of endangered rainforest keeps 260 tonnes of carbon safely "locked
up" within the forest itself, unable to escape and pollute the
atmosphere.
Whoever owns the land or the trees, this method of "capturing" or
"locking" carbon into forests is not going to have the knock-on effect
of saving the planet. Cool Earth does not claim explicitly to be in the
offsetting game, but the carbon that it claims can be "locked up" in
one acre of forest would offset 30 round-trips to Rio de Janeiro, say.
For the environmental groups Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth, this
forestry offsetting craze is acting as a smokescreen, and detracting
from real solutions to escalating emissions.
"Taking a dodgy accounting proposition, which is that you can somehow
identify the amount of carbon that any given new bit of forest picks up
out of the atmosphere and sequesters, and make that correspond somehow
to emissions elsewhere," is how Greenpeace sees carbon offsetting,
according to its senior climate adviser Charlie Kronick. "It can't be
done. The methodology is poor, and the logic isn't very good either.
Once the carbon you've put in from fossil fuels is up there, nothing is
going to make it go away."
Friends of the Earth's Marie Reynolds points out that not only is
offsetting no substitute for real emissions cuts, but there is no
guarantee, when you plant a tree, what the future of that tree will be.
Robin Oakley, Greenpeace's climate and energy campaigner, agrees: "The
issue with offsetting is that, fundamentally, it doesn't undo the
damage done by carbon pollution. The vast number of players in the
offsetting market are not reducing emissions in any accountable or
measurable way."
In some cases, local people, far from benefiting, suffer when huge new
plantations spring up. Survival International campaigner David Hill
says: "Numerous reports show how indigenous peoples have suffered as a
result of carbon projects: invasion of their land, evictions, the
destruction of villages and crops, reduced access to or destruction of
traditional resources, and violent conflict."
Offsetting is popular because it makes people feel much better about
taking long-haul flights or driving gas-guzzling vehicles. "They are
being misled," says Oakley. "Most carbon offsetting companies are
making a killing." Climate Care, the company David Cameron pays his
green-guilt tax to, has recently been bought by the investment bank J P
Morgan. In the credit-crunch climate, any new acquisitions are thought
through very carefully, and only the most watertight pass muster. This
move suggests that carbon offsetting is currently considered one of the
most risk-free industries around.
Very few not-for-profit offsetting companies exist. Myclimate is one,
and only uses "Gold Standard" offsets, a strict set of criteria for
measuring where the money is going, drawn up by a number of
international campaigning organisations. Since last year's conference
in Bali to discuss how to take climate-change proposals past the Kyoto
Protocol agreement, the Environment Secretary Hilary Benn has been
working on a certification system to keep carbon cowboys out of the
market. Redd – reduced emissions from deforestation and degradation –
is the UN's proposed trading mechanism, which aims to pay countries not
to cut down their forests.
"Turning the forest into just another commodity is not going to protect
the climate or the lives of the people who live there," says Kronick.
Surprisingly, perhaps, Greenpeace is in favour of extracting value from
forests in other ways, such as the deal that was recently hammered out
between Guyana and Canopy Capital, a group of British financiers to
protect the Iwokrama Forest last week. The Independent first reported a
plea from the Guyanan President, Bharrat Jagdeo, last November, to
structure exactly this type of deal for all of Guyana's forests.
Michael Woods, a partner in the law firm Stephenson Harwood and head of
its environment department, oversaw the deal. "It focuses on
eco-systems services and the value a forest provides," he explains.
"Rainfall is the best example. Without the trees, the eco-system will
not produce the rainfall that then benefits other parts of South
America, even as far as the American Midwest. It's a global utility
service on which agriculture relies, and its value should be
recognised."
However, this sort of protectoral behaviour, especially when overseen
by foreign advisers, provokes worried disapproval from many green
corners, giving rise to cries of neo- or eco-colonialism. "If there's
going to be financial compensation for eco-systems services, which
recognises that they provide a service other than locking up carbon, it
should be for the people who live in those forests," says Kronick. "How
do they get a share of the proceeds? How do you preserve national
sovereignty, so that under the banner of climate change it doesn't
become a kind of eco-colonialism?"
"This is not about buying land or trees," says Andrew Mitchell, a
director of Canopy Capital and an experienced conservationist. "It is
about trying to put a new value on forests for countries such as Guyana
that are not destroying their forests. We need a new economic paradigm
that values them, so that there's more of an incentive to leave them
standing than cutting them down."
This sort of deal is in its infancy. It is described by climate-change
specialists as "avoided deforestation", and similar projects should be
rolled out in the next phase of the Kyoto Protocol. Other countries are
already envious of Guyana's pioneering deal. Indonesia, Brazil, Papua
New Guinea and the Democratic Republic of Congo would all benefit
massively from similar arrangements.
Despite the potential quagmires over forest ownership, Greenpeace is in
favour, because safe-guarding a forest, as well as ensuring the
livelihoods of its inhabitants, has a real effect on climate change.
"It is like sticking a cork in an industrial process," says Kronick.
"It is taking one of the sources of climate change – deforestation
accounts for up to 30 per cent of total carbon emissions in the
atmosphere – and removing it.
"It must be a part of whatever solutions we come up with for climate
change. Protecting forests is one of the smartest things that we can
do."
Alternatives to offsetting
The people who live in forests are the first to be hit by their
destruction. Survival International and the Forest Peoples Programme
help indigenous communities to protect their rights to manage and
control their own habitat. www.survival-international.org
www.forestpeoples.org
Rather than "buying your cool" (carbon emissions) back from suspect
sources, Global Cool has suggestions for reducing emissions in real
terms: turn the heating down; switch appliances off at the mains; use
an energy supplier that invests in renewables
www.globalcool.org
Don't forget that conserving forests (as long as they're not
ring-fenced and the local people pushed out) is a good thing, and lots
of organisations who have jumped on the offsetting bandwagon started
out in straightforward conservation. The Woodland Trust estimates that,
for a £2.75 monthly membership fee, it can "protect and care for"
half an acre of native woodland. They won't sell you areas of woodland,
but you can have spaces dedicated to a loved one. As there is no major
problem with deforestation in the UK, this saves ancient woodland, but
it won't stop climate change.
www.woodland-trust.org.uk
You could still pay for offsets, but check you are giving your money to
a not-for-profit organisation that is selling Gold Standard carbon
offsets, such as myclimate. Don't expect your money to save trees; most
of the Gold Standard projects involve switching communities from fossil
fuel to other types of power.
http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/green-living/the-great-carbon-con-can-offsetting-really-
help-to-save-the-planet-803933.html
