After all, trees don’t grow everywhere does that mean that the only way to fight climate change is to plant every bit of public and private land to trees? Missing the (climate) forest for the trees Even other kinds of natural environments – including grasslands – didn’t have the potential biomass and CO2 absorption of forests.īut these days, scientists and market analysts alike are starting to take a closer look at the numbers. Given those numbers, an obvious way to fight climate change was to plant empty land to forests. And as an added bonus, the CO2 sequestered in the trunks of the trees remains there in the form of lumber, only gradually being released as trunks and boards decay. Most of that absorption occurs after about 40 years, once the tree reaches maturity.Įxtrapolate that out a bit, and you’ve got the potential for hundreds of tonnes of CO2 emissions trapped in every hectare of mature forest. One tree can absorb anywhere from 400 pounds to 1 ton of atmospheric carbon emissions over the course of its life. It’s partly that last idea – afforestation – that has led to increasing scrutiny of the entire idea of forest-based credits.įor years, the logic went something like this: If you’re planting trees where there never really was a forest, that’s afforestation – planting a whole new potential carbon sink. That’s basic prevention but in cases where forests existed historically, credits take the form of reforestation. Prevent a chunk of the Amazon rainforest from being cut down, and you’ve saved all the carbon dioxide currently trapped in the trunks of those trees. The Kyoto framework turned out to be not entirely kind to forestry-based credits themselves, but the idea of using forests to combat greenhouse gas emissions quickly took root.Īs with most nature-based carbon credits, forestry credits take two primary forms: They began, formally, under the Kyoto Protocol. Forestry-based credits – the original carbon offsetsįorest-based credits have been around for decades in one form or another. But for the foreseeable future, the world of carbon offsets will continue to be dominated by nature-based solutions.Īnd until very recently, nature-based offsets have meant primarily one thing: trees. Yes, there’s growing interest in removal techniques like CCS (carbon capture and storage) and DAC (direct air capture). A few decades into the growth of the carbon market, and most carbon offsets are still nature-based.
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