Sustainable Forests
Why the Emphasis on Managed Sustainable Forests?
One type of offsetting has a unique role to play in the fight against climate change – tree planting and forest conservation.
Deforestation is estimated to cause approximately 25% of global greenhouse gas emissions, so any scheme that halts the clearing of trees will have a positive effect.
Meanwhile, planting and managing new forests is one proven and documented method for actually taking carbon from the atmosphere.
Trees are Nature’s carbon scrubbers. While it is possible to fit a device to a factory chimney to capture greenhouse gases before they reach the atmosphere, there is at present no other viable way to start cleaning up the billions of tonnes of carbon already pumped into the air except through trees and healthy ecosystems.
The estimated costs of storing CO2 underground run as high as $100 per tonne — several times the cost of storing it in trees. And forests are more than just carbon farms.
Provided that tree planting and forest conservation and management are done with sensitivity and understanding, they bring many other benefits — they provide wildlife habitat and biodiversity, they prevent soil erosion, they purify water sources, they provide food (nuts, fruits, berries) and shelter and recreation.
If managed sustainably, they can be a renewable energy source, as well as building materials that store carbon instead of releasing it. They are solar powered, and their exhaust is oxygen.
A study by the United Nations Environmental Program and the World Conservation Union states: “In industrialized countries, environmentally sound carbon sequestration activities in existing forests can be facilitated by encouraging longer rotations, selective harvesting and reduced impact logging, and by utilizing other ecologically sensitive forest management practices.”
And in May 2008, the G-8 Ministers of the Environment urged action on a proposal titled “Kobe Call for Action for Biodiversity calling for the advancement of sustainable forest management including the conservation of forest biodiversity.”