Planting Trees For Carbon Neutral Programs Does This Works To Reduce Carbon Offset

It is thanks to misleading carbon-offset schemes that an airport or a fossil-fuel company can claim that it is carbon-neutral because it is offsetting its emissions through the planting of trees. By buying carbon offsetting, companies are further mitigating their emissions and moving towards being carbon neutral. Carbon offsets finance projects that reduce emissions elsewhere, like planting trees or producing renewable energy. While all trees take in carbon, not all initiatives that plant trees provide carbon offsets, which are credits companies or individuals can take in order to compensate for their carbon emissions.

These commitments almost always involve some kind of carbon offset - it usually comes down to planting trees that absorb the same amount of CO2. A recently planted tree may take up to 20 years to sequester the amount of CO2 promised by a carbon-offset plan. While trees do trap huge amounts of carbon, they have to stay growing for long periods of time in order to be efficient carbon stores, experts say.

Studies have shown old-growth forests pull more carbon out of the atmosphere than farms, which are just the same species of trees planted row after row. While itas obvious that planting trees does indeed offset CO2 emissions, the potential effect has just as much to do with quality as quantity. Wead need to plant and protect massive numbers of trees over decades in order to offset even a small portion of global emissions.

The resulting 0.9 billion hectares of new trees could sequester 25% of our current CO2 emissions, returning us to levels we were at almost a century ago. By planting over half a trillion trees, an international team of researchers says, we could sequester an estimated 205 gigatons of carbon -- one gigaton is a billion metric tons -- cutting carbon in the atmosphere by roughly 25 percent. Models, combined with satellite observations, could look at whether ecosystems would take in more carbon if we planted new trees.

Recent studies suggest the most effective strategies for offsets to tree planting include reforestation, which is focused on restoring a diverse ecosystem. For instance, forest offsets plant native species of trees to replace areas ravaged by destruction. We know planting trees for carbon offsets can feel overwhelming, and it may feel like using a different offset strategy to cancel emissions for each small one, but remember, a journey of a thousand miles begins with one small step.

For instance, planting trees that pull carbon from the atmosphere when they grow, or providing fuel-efficient stoves for communities in developing countries. The idea is that companies can cancel their impact on carbon emissions on climate change by stopping an equivalent amount of emissions that would happen by losing forests, which store vast amounts of carbon in their trees and soils, and draw carbon from the atmosphere.

Forests are one of our best lines of defense against climate change, and their restoration is critical, but it cannot replace reducing carbon emissions directly. The amount of forest restoration needed to offset our emissions using trees is too large given our intensity of carbon emissions, and so plant-to-tree programs are not capable of meeting CO2 sequestration requirements.