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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. Read rest...
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