Memorandum submitted by Treeflights.com.
At Treeflights.com we provide a carbon offset
treeplanting service for individual airline passengers. We are
the first company in the world to specifically plant trees to
absorb the CO2 released by air travel. My personal area of expertise
is in the planting of deciduous trees in Wales in which I have
30 years experience.
I believe that treeplanting can play a critical
role in addressing the problem of climate change.
As you know the first ever carbon offsets were
provided by treeplanting. In recent times most offset groups have
veered away from tree-based (bio-sequestration) towards emission
reduction offsets. Two primary reasons for this are that (1) Early
treeplanting projects ran into a number of well documented problems
and (2) Carbon absorption by trees is impossible to accurately
quantify.
At Treeflights.com we have designed our service
to address the problems surrounding offset treeplanting with a
view to providing a transparent, ethically valid and substantive,
secure offset.
To give you some outline idea of how we do this.
The land on which we plant is being given over,
in perpetuity, to a charitable trust. Every tree we plant is individually
tagged and grid-referenced for verification purposes. We demonstrate
clear additionality of planting. We plant mixed deciduous (local
provenance) woodland of 8 species. We have a well-developed management
plan for our forests using only trees that ultimately may be harvested
for timber, thereby locking up CO2 for the long-term. We specifically
warn our customers that their flight will not be "carbon-neutral".
1. My main concern is that in view of the
ethical shortcomings of some early (and current) tree-based offset
schemes and the difficulties inherent in measuring the amounts
of carbon that trees will absorb, the EAC will take a view that
carbon-offset treeplanting is not something that should be encouraged.
2. At a time when we have too much CO2 in
our atmosphere, we need to remember that trees have evolved over
billions of years to be incredibly efficient at withdrawing carbon
from the air. It could be a fateful mistake for us not to take
advantage of the tremendously powerful absorptive capabilities
of trees in this regard, purely because they do not do this in
an accurately quantifiable manner.
3. There is in fact a precedent for the
large-scale removal of carbon from the atmosphere by trees. All
the carbon that we are busily pumping into the air by the use
of fossil fuels was originally fixed by trees in the distant past.
Whilst there are many arguments against offset treeplanting lets
not forget this simple fact:
4. Trees absorb CO2 from the atmosphere.
Let us take advantage of this.
January 2007
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