In March, Jim Hourdequin, the CEO of Lyme Timber – one of the world’s largest suppliers of carbon offsets to companies like Chevron – admitted that lax standards have allowed his forestry company to earn US$53 million over the past two years without making significant changes to business as usual. The company received offset payments from polluting industries on projects that, as Bloomberg put it, “don’t actually change the way forests are managed, and therefore do little to help the climate.”

Carbon offsets have a bad name for a good reason. Some of the biggest polluters exploit offsets purely to avoid making cuts to their emissions. And some of the biggest offset sellers rake in profits while failing to achieve equitable or even tangible climate benefits. With a fifth of the world’s biggest companies already committed to United Nations net-zero targets, and virtually all relying on offsets to reach that goal, the growing climate accountability across the private sector is now driving growth of a carbon-offset industry that has its own climate accountability problems.

At the same time, offsets are one of the only opportunities for financing the critical work of ecosystem care and climate repair today. In Atlantic Canada, for example, which receives less than 3% of environmental funding nationally and experiences low rural incomes coupled with high rates of clearcut forestry, the non-profit I work for has used carbon partnerships with sustainable architecture and film companies to protect some of the region’s last carbon-rich and biodiverse forests.

This mix of failures and redeeming opportunities reflects the broader complexity of transitioning to a low-carbon economy, as well as society’s relatively novice response to the climate crisis. We’re still learning and adapting. It also, however, reflects the depth of exploitation that companies are capable of when market-based mechanisms are deployed in absence of strong policy and regulatory oversight.

Almost 20 years since the first carbon-offset mechanisms emerged, it is becoming increasingly difficult to forgive these ongoing failures. Carbon offsetting can hope to remain reputable today only if its two most harmful pitfalls are addressed: the failure to ensure significant reductions in overall emissions in first priority, and the failure to achieve genuine carbon-storage outcomes in an equitable way. In a bid to help solve these challenges and promote even greater investment in carbon offsetting, Mark Carney – the former governor of the Bank of Canada and the Bank of England – made bold promises at the COP26 climate conference to grow the voluntary market to US$100 billion per year by the end of this decade. Less than two years later, the Taskforce on Scaling Voluntary Carbon Markets is being scaled back. Now rebranded as the Integrity Council for the Voluntary Carbon Market, the initiative is grappling with the same regulatory shortfalls that have plagued offsets since their invention.

In the meantime, carbon markets are growing in Canada and around the world. According to Refinitiv, a subsidiary of the London Stock Exchange, the voluntary market reached a record high US$1 billion last year, while more established compliance markets surpassed US$850 billion.

Pioneering Papua New Guinea bans new carbon deals

Offsetting was popularized by the Kyoto Protocol, which came into force in 2005. The treaty recognized that wealthier countries are historically responsible for climate change, while nations throughout the Majority World – a term that replaces the expressions “developing world” or “Global South” to better recognize that this is where 80% of humanity lives – suffer the majority of negative impacts. All signatories set equalized emission reduction targets, recognizing their differentiated climate responsibilities, and a mechanism was created – offsetting – where those states failing to meet their climate goals could make up for it by transferring a proportionate amount of wealth to countries that were beating their own national targets and picking up the slack in the fight against climate change.

Papua New Guinea, an island state home to some of Earth’s largest remaining tropical forests cared for generatively by Indigenous communities for over 50,000 years, was positioned to be one of those countries that could exceed national targets. At the same 2005 UN climate summit in which offsetting was enacted, the government of Papua New Guinea put forward the first-ever proposal to store additional carbon by protecting exceptionally biodiverse and carbon-rich forests. They invited high-polluting states to pay for tropical forest protection to not only help meet global emission reduction targets but also replace the financial losses their country would face by deferring timber harvests – revenues that the country needed to take care of its people.

This April, Papua New Guinea’s minister of environment enacted a moratorium on new voluntary carbon-offset projects in the country. Civil society watchdogs identified major weaknesses and loopholes in projects being developed there and raised concerns that the exploitative history of logging interests infringing on the rights of Indigenous people was now simply being perpetuated by carbon project developers. The government has banned all new voluntary carbon projects until laws can be enacted that properly safeguard the rights of the people who have lived and worked with forests forever.

Carbon offsets have a bad name for a good reason.

Should we throw out all carbon offsets? Not quite yet. Transitioning millions of hectares of land and millions of jobs toward the protection and restoration of Earth’s natural life-support systems is fundamental to halting the climate crisis. Carbon-offset frameworks can aid in that transition, by channelling wealth into carbon-storage livelihoods like climate-focused forestry, farming and conservation. But we need fair carbon-storage payments that directly compensate the people who live and work most closely with the land, enabling them to make decisions optimized for carbon drawdown, and we need to decouple the source of those payments from the continued emissions of the highest-polluting industries.

Oil and gas companies, for example, shouldn’t be allowed to participate in offset programs; they should just be required to reduce their emissions. Analysis from Oxfam found that it would take a forest the size of Ghana to offset just 15% of BP’s ongoing emissions by 2050. That’s a single company and doesn’t take into account BP’s historical emissions, which also require reparations. There is literally not enough planet for the highest-polluting industries to offset their way out of the climate crisis.

Hope in first-ever citizen forest carbon program in Canada

Over the past decade, our small team at Community Forests International has worked on the forest and people side of the climate equation. We’ve developed new approaches to forestry that maximize carbon storage and climate resilience, we’ve informed policy improvements at the provincial and national scale, and we’ve developed novel forest carbon projects.

This summer, with collaborators across a community of more than 80,000 rural small forest owners in the Maritime provinces and partners at the Natural Capital Exchange (NCX) – a leading carbon marketplace dedicated to democratizing forest carbon markets – we will be enrolling tens of thousands of acres into the first-ever citizen forest carbon program in Canada.

In a region with some of the most intense forest cutting and lowest incomes nationally, this reflects the potential in transition pathways that centre the people most affected – in this case rural, forest-dependent communities and economies. It is creating entirely new climate-focused forest occupations and incomes for people who can now go to work storing more carbon in the forests they care for.

It would take a forest the size of Ghana to offset just 15% of BP’s ongoing emissions by 2050. There is literally not enough forest for polluting industries to offset their way out of the crisis.

There are countless opportunities like this, and carbon offsets are a relatively small part of the story. But the work of nature-based carbon storage, like virtually all climate solutions, requires far greater investment than it is currently afforded – and investment that is unconflicted by the ongoing climate damages of the most polluting industries. Otherwise, these solutions will fail to produce their promised results on a scale and timeline that is meaningful in the global climate crisis. Or the positive measures that society takes to remunerate ecosystem care in one sector will be cancelled out by damages in another – the worst possible outcome of carbon offsetting.

UN Secretary-General António Guterres described the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report, published in February, as “an atlas of human suffering and a damning indictment of failed climate leadership.” The window is closing on limiting planetary heating to 1.5°C. Global emissions must peak by 2025 and then plummet, while at the same time forests and other ecosystems must be protected and restored to their full carbon-sequestration capacity by 2030.

What type of world will we face toward the end of this decade? A brighter one, if we make full use of all possible climate solutions today, including carbon offsetting. But it requires us to remember that tools like carbon offsets were only ever invented to enable a transition – not to delay it. In the words of Jonathan Foley, the executive director of Project Drawdown, “the best offset is the one you do not need.”

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I’ve witnessed this transformation here in the Zanzibar archipelago, a delicate string of islands in the Indian Ocean where my colleagues have been planting millions of trees over the past decade. This week, I visited dry and rugged coral areas where tree cover is now returning to the land and witnessed how this is repairing the local ecosystem and creating jobs and wealth for the people who live within it. Our team recently expanded this same approach to nearby Mozambique – and it is crucial work increasingly in demand around the world.

Forests and people aren’t thriving together today. Forest loss accelerated in 2020, increasing more than 12% even while overall economic activity declined globally due to COVID-19. According to a recent big-picture analysis by Our World in Data, however, “[a] future with more people and more forest is possible.”

Making the necessary transformations at scale is the idea behind the Canadian government’s 2 Billion Trees program. Unfortunately, the government hasn’t reached much of this goal yet, according to The Globe and Mail. The most recently available numbers suggest that only 8.5 million trees have been planted so far, and 7.6 million of those are spruce and lodgepole pine planted in British Columbia. In the rest of the country, 28% of the total trees can be attributed to the relatively small charity that I work for, Community Forests International, and I can assure you we were not expecting to score so high on the leaderboard. The final totals for 2021 will be available soon, but the overall story of lagging results remains the theme. 

And Canada needs a much more ambitious goal than planting two billion trees over 10 years if we are going to realize the potential our forests offer for climate security. For example, requiring forestry companies to store more carbon than they emit through their harvest operations would be far more significant. In fact, Canada’s managed forests currently emit more carbon than they store, because of overharvesting and the increased impacts of climate change, such as fires.

A new Indigenous seed-collection initiative, just announced as part of the 2 Billion Trees program and to be delivered by the National Tree Seed Centre in New Brunswick, is an exciting step in the right direction. The initiative aims to partner with Indigenous communities to incorporate traditional ecological knowledge (TEK) into seed saving and to gather seeds from species of special cultural and economic value to First Nations. Proceeding with care, especially in respecting and protecting the invaluable Indigenous knowledge shared through this process, is critical to ensuring that justice is upheld in this forest effort and that the same extractive mistakes on the land are not repeated in the realm of knowledge and culture.

Canada needs a much more ambitious goal than planting two billion trees over 10 years if we are going to realize the potential our forests offer for climate security.

People will become a positive force for forests and for the climate when we achieve justice in how forests are cared for. That means empowering rural and Indigenous communities that live and work most closely with forests with the rights to decide how their home ecosystems are respected and managed. Too often those decisions are made by companies with prevailing short-term profit motives and no rooted place in the ecosystems and communities they’re impacting. 

Deforestation in the Amazon reached a record high last month, and new research based on two decades of satellite images published in Nature Climate Change warns that the world’s largest rainforest is now approaching a “tipping point.” Among the worst drivers of not just the deforestation and greenhouse gas emissions but also the displacement of forest-dependent communities are multinational agribusinesses and their foreign financiers. The same satellite record also reveals vibrant areas of the Amazon that have remained healthy and intact, with distinct boundaries matching areas where Indigenous rights have been upheld.

We have to get beyond the idea that people are necessarily the problem. People have always been a part of forests. We are not separate. There’s roughly the same area of “wild” land on Earth today as there was 12,000 years ago. It’s shocking to those of us immersed in colonial narratives of “pristine nature,” but people have always shaped forests in significant ways. The difference today is that the ways in which colonial societies and economies shape land is overwhelmingly devastating.

Today, more than 97% of land on Earth is no longer intact and has lost the required richness and biodiversity to maintain ecological integrity. Our life-support systems are collapsing. Protecting and restoring more forests as biodiverse cultural landscapes – by respecting local and Indigenous land rights and knowledge as a first priority – is not only ethically necessary but one of the most important contributions we can make to stabilizing the climate. Because the history, wisdom and science are clear: Indigenous and other collective communities do a better job of keeping forests and their vital carbon stores intact over the long-term.

I see this here in Zanzibar, where community groups are time and time again the best protectors of coastal mangrove forests. Mangroves grow half on land and half in the ocean and are the most carbon-dense forests in the world. At-risk coastal communities we have the honour of working alongside have been taking it upon themselves to safeguard and restore these special mangrove ecosystems. They’re doing it without any carbon-offset financing or payment for ecosystem services because they understand that mangroves provide their nearby homes with irreplaceable protection against rising sea levels and that the work is simply necessary.

And I see it in my home province of New Brunswick, where the Wolastoqey Nation is striving to assert the right to care for and benefit from millions of acres of traditional lands, much of which was sold illegally for $1.50 an acre to companies that have profited from their destruction. This movement is so important right now – most significantly for justice and reconciliation, but also for the forests of New Brunswick and for the global climate. No tree-planting strategy could match the climate and economic benefit offered by transitioning these lands back under the care of Indigenous communities with ongoing reparations to practise restorative management optimized for carbon drawdown.

The International Day of Forests happens to coincide with the International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, and this invites us to reflect on all the ways forests and justice are woven together today and every day – and then to take action.

Daimen Hardie is co-founder of Community Forests International.

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A pivotal study titled Natural Climate Solutions describes how combining deep fossil-fuel reductions with equally ambitious ecosystem-restoration efforts globally gives us a solid chance of keeping heating below the Paris limit. There is still hope in the 11th hour, even as the UN warns we have only 127 months left to make this happen. Planting trees is the most popular natural climate solution right now and is rapidly gaining investment from businesses and governments around the world.

The Liberal Party of Canada has pledged $2 billion to plant two billion trees over the next 10 years, which equates to reforesting a million hectares of land. To put this in perspective, that’s only 0.25% of the country’s total forest area. It’s a start, but it’s an underwhelming target for a nation with such immense natural landscapes and a capacity to deploy natural climate solutions at a globally significant scale – especially considering that we’re talking about our best response to the sixth mass extinction event in roughly the last 443 million years, this one caused by people.

In New Brunswick and Nova Scotia alone, more than 100,000 hectares of forest are clear-cut every year. All two billion trees could be planted within these two small provinces and it wouldn’t keep pace with the cutting. What’s more, replanting a hectare of land for every hectare of forest cleared is not equivalent, because it takes upwards of 100 years of ongoing protection and restoration to successfully rebuild a healthy forest. Tree planting is often treated as the final act of restoration, but putting a seedling in the ground is just the first step.

Crowther Lab, an ecosystem research group whose work inspired the recent surge in tree-planting ventures, estimates that Canada could be planting 20 times more than the present target. Marc Benioff, the founder of Salesforce, announced at the World Economic Forum that his 1t.org initiative will plant between 50 and 100 billion trees in the United States and one trillion trees globally by 2030. Crowther Lab’s research suggests that achieving the trillion-tree target would store about two thirds of all the carbon emissions produced since the Industrial Revolution. This is the level of ambition we need – something for the next generations to remember us by – but even so, all these targets are misplaced.

Several scientists have pointed out flaws in the Crowther Lab model, including recommendations to plant trees in areas where they don’t grow naturally or where they might even heat the planet rather than cool it. But the most critical point missed in all this is that planting more trees doesn’t always grow more forests – and it’s entire forest ecosystems that store the lion’s share of carbon, not just trees. For example, an average of 70% of the carbon stored in healthy forests is actually stored in soil.

Planting more trees doesn’t always grow more forests –

 it’s entire forest ecosystems that store the lion’s share of carbon.

 

The Canadian government will pursue a 50% cost-share to deliver its program, aiming to raise $4 billion overall to plant two billion trees – a $2 per tree budget. That $2 must go a long way. It has to cover the costs of growing a seedling, which takes at least two years of professional care. Then there’s readying a planting site, and in the best models this includes securing legal land title or some comparable land covenant to ensure the trees won’t get cut down. Then comes transportation and caring for planting stock and, of course, the actual planting. Volunteers can help, but most of them tire after their first thousand trees (and often plant those incorrectly, I’m afraid, resulting in low survival rates, like the 90% mortality reported in Turkey’s recent 11-million-tree mass planting effort).

A professional tree-planter plants around 2,000 trees per day and 100,000 per season on average, although the intensity of the terrain and length of the planting seasons vary widely across Canada. This checks out with the Liberals’ estimation that the program will support 3,500 seasonal jobs. These are extremely demanding jobs though, and out of the $2 per tree workers themselves will likely receive only 15 to 20 cents, or $15,000 to $20,000 gross per season.

To make ends meet the rest of the year, tree-planters often work temporary service-industry jobs, and the unfolding COVID-19 crisis now puts them in even more precarious employment. Anyone who has worked in a tree-planting camp can tell you how tenuous occupational health is, too, when all the workers live in tents, drink chlorinated lake water and perform like professional athletes every day – without so much as duct tape to protect raw hands, or sometime faces when the blackflies are especially bad. It raises the question of who will actually bear the costs of achieving these targets. Restoring Earth’s ecosystems is among the most important work on the planet right now, and the two-billion-tree program could go a lot further to acknowledge and remunerate the worth of these jobs.

Canada could reach for a much higher goal than two billion trees over 10 years. The country’s forestry industry already plants more than 600 million trees per year – three times more than the output the government is targeting. If Canada responded to climate breakdown like the emergency it is and invested proportionally, the country could undoubtedly plant an additional 10 billion trees. Simply scaling up existing models will not bring about a transition to a fair, climate-smart economy though. We need entirely new models. Besides, the opportunity cost of doubling down on this tree-planting pathway is potentially much higher than any cash outlay we can imagine.

Tree planting is charismatic and when done effectively is definitely beneficial. Its broad appeal is invaluable, considering how politics have hindered climate action ever since the first international climate treaty in 1992. In this crisis, the pace of our response is critical; the impacts of a changing climate accelerate over time and if left unchecked will outpace our ability to respond altogether. Planting more trees is being presented as a low-cost pathway out of the emergency, but it isn’t fast and it isn’t adequate on its own.

A recent analysis from the Smart Prosperity Institute estimated that Canada’s two billion trees would deliver carbon sequestration at a rate of $20 per tonne, well below the $50 per tonne cost-feasibility threshold. The impact is achieved over the lifetime of the trees though, not immediately, because it takes decades for a tiny seedling to grow up and have a positive effect on the climate. Planting trees is always an investment in the future, and today it’s an invaluable investment in the future of our climate, but if we don’t match this with immediate emission cuts we’ll lose by winning slowly.

Prime Minister Trudeau stated that Canada will finance the two-billion-tree program with revenues from the Trans Mountain Pipeline, a major piece of oil-and-gas infrastructure the government purchased from Kinder Morgan in 2018. This illustrates a fundamental and often overlooked point: investments in natural climate solutions stand a chance of working only if they’re paired with sweeping reductions in fossil fuel extraction. We can’t do one without the other and expect anything but failure. The climate responds to physics, not spin.

Canada’s vast forests could be protected and restored as some of the planet’s greatest climate safeguards, holding enough carbon to help save the world. But that’s not the path we’re on. With intensive harvesting and natural disturbances worsened by climate change, Canada’s forests presently emit more carbon than they absorb. When trees are cut down or burned, they release emissions back into the atmosphere. That’s why the million trees I planted didn’t really help the climate: I planted them on industrial forestlands across Canada, lands destined to be clear-cut again on short rotation.

To make tree planting count for the climate, we have to focus on natural forest regeneration and durable improvements to ecosystems, using proven strategies like legal rights to Indigenous and other collective communities that do a better job of keeping forests intact over the long term – that’s what the science supports. And Canada can go so much further than planting two billion trees. The other 99.75% of the country’s immense forests, including industrial forests, could be transitioned to climate-smart management optimized for carbon drawdown. Transferring land back to First Nations with ongoing reparations to support forest protection could move us closer to socially just solutions.

Protecting existing forests in all these ways, unlike planting new trees, would have an immediate impact on the climate. This is Canada’s real opportunity to deliver natural climate solutions at a historic scale and speed.

Reducing a complex problem into a simple solution, like reducing a complex forest ecosystem into a simple number of trees, is an effective way to gain mass appeal but disappoints when it comes to delivering real results. We’re literally at risk of losing sight of the forest for the trees here – and the trees are good. They’re just not enough. If we’re betting on natural climate solutions to secure a liveable future, we really need to get this right.

1) It takes advance time and investment to prepare for tree-planting efforts and to grow the necessary seedings. Tree nurseries will need to start seeds now to have planting stock in two years’ time. By issuing the RFPs now (even with just approximate estimates of seedling allocations per Province and Territory), the federal government would provide both nurseries and tree-planting organizations across the country with some security around which to plan and make necessary preparations. This is particularly critical and potentially valuable right now given the larger context of economic uncertainty created by the COVID19 pandemic.

2) Look to existing processes such as the Pathway to Canada Target 1 Challenge to accelerate the Two Billion Tree Program and achieve durable forest restoration and protection outcomes.
The federal government’s Canada Target 1 funding programs are already structured to support the widespread protection of ecologically-sensitive land via land trusts, Indigenous organizations, and Provincial and Territorial governments. These programs could now be expanded and adapted to include degraded lands in need of restoration, through which the Two Billion Tree Program restoration efforts could flow in an accelerated way that also ensures restored forests are protected over the long-term.

3) Focus particularly on the Indigenous Protected and Conserved Areas (IPCA) process already underway under Canada Target 1 to inject funds for restoration into the land-back movement.
The IPCA program focuses on protecting and conserving ecosystems through Indigenous laws, governance and knowledge systems; several IPCAs are currently already underway under Canada Target 1. Considering that a lot of the land available to Indigenous communities is in need of restoration, the IPCA program in particular should be expanded to receive Two Billion Tree Program support for securing, replanting, and stewarding degraded lands by Indigenous communities and organizations.

4) Send clear statements against industrial exploitation, and then take clear steps to establish those safeguards.
These Two Billion Tree Program must be additional to the status quo planting that is done yearly by the forest industry – i.e., the two billion trees must be protected from future harvesting so that they can continue to grow, sequester carbon, and mitigate climate change. The Two Billion Tree Program will need to build and support long-term protections for these newly reforested lands, and this will be especially important after the honeymoon phase of the initiative has passed (and the public eye is no longer directly tuned to it).

5) Commit now to additional support for long-term stewardship of the planted trees and reforested lands.
Planting trees is only the first step in the very long process of forest restoration. The 2 billion trees and 2.5 million acres of replanted land will need ongoing care to ensure successful seedling establishment and durable results. The Two billion Tree Program will need to be expanded to include support for long-term stewardship of the newly planted forests, including support for adaptive management as unpredictable impacts of changing climate place additional stresses on our forest ecosystems.

Daimen Hardie is co-founder of Community Forests International

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