In mid-January of 2006, during the federal election campaign, Canadian Green party leader Jim Harris released the following:
The Green Party will completely offset the greenhouse gas pollution produced by the leader's tour by planting enough trees to absorb all of these emissions, said Green Party of Canada leader Jim Harris today.
Tree Canada Foundation certified the Green Party of Canada's leader's campaign carbon-neutral today in
The Tree Canada Foundation had the following news release:
The Tree Canada Foundation certified the Green Party of Canada's leader's campaign carbon-neutral today in
In addition, Tree
Oops, that 20 years got lost in the Green Party press release. The problem with the Green party's rather sloppy offset is that the offset will only have occured if, after 20 years, the trees survive insects, fire, cutting, and then mature into a permanent forest. Who is there to guarantee that? If the land had been left to itself, would it not have sprouted trees on its own? Does this forestry project satisfy additionality? Unfortunately the Tree Canada website does not answer these questions and does not record any details of the trees it 'planted'. I've sent an email to them (March 21, 2007) asking for information. One clue is that Tree Canada sells offsets through cleanairpass.com. That organization buys credits on the Chicago Climate Change (CCX) I believe and perhaps bought afforestation or reforestation credits on the CCX from some counterparty. I believe it is a fair statement that tree-planting is a controversial Green House Gas offset, and requires at minimum a careful accounting, best made public so that it can be verified.
4 comments:
Thanks for your post, "ru". I hope that as many organizations as possible try to support claims of permanence, additionality and verification with public data, so that offset treeplanting can become more widely accepted and used. In this case a political orgnization was benefitting from a claim that should have had some public documentation to back it up I think. Also dropping the 20 year time lag was not so smart.
Update: I received the following reply from Tree Canada:
The trees you want to know about were planted in Fall 2006. They were planted in Park areas in the City of Toronto area for naturalization. Several parks were involved, e.g. the Taylor Massey Park and the Woodlands Park - Rouge Park.
All the trees we plant are native to the area where they get planted and suitable for the site. Some of the species planted in this particular planting were White birch (Betula papyrifera), Sugar maple (Acer saccharum), White Pine (Pinus strobus) and Basswood (Tilia americana).
The land these trees were planted on is municipality owned.
Here is something I found that I like from Ru's site, treeflight.com:
When you order a Treeflight an automatically generated email is sent to you,confirming your order. We also receive an email with your order details,which we print out for record purposes. We transfer those details to a waterproof label which is then tagged on to the tree(s) of your choice in our nursery. When it comes to planting time (October - March), your tree is brought out to the mountainside to plant. Once planted the plastic label is replaced with a metal tag that is stamped with the unique Treeflight reference number contained within the initial confirmation email that you received from us. If you ever want to visit your tree it is important that you keep a record of this (TF.Ref no.). We then send you an email confirmation of planting with a map of the planting site showing where your tree is situated.
Another thing I like from treeflight.com is this:
...we are creating a charitable trust, the Treeflights Trust, to hold ownership, in perpetuity, of the land on which the trees are planted. In this way we can reassure our customers that the forests that they are creating will be completely secure. The governing document of the Treeflights Trust states that:
" the purpose of this trust is to maintain and nurture the Treeflights Forests in such a way as to (A) minimise flowback of carbon to the atmosphere as CO2 and (B) to encourage biodiversity and community access to these forests".
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