And on 200 acres of woodlands and forest gardens an hour outside of Ottawa, Diana Beresford-Kroeger is trying to seed a revolution to save the global forests. “This is a living planet. We will not have a living planet without those trees,” says the 80-year-old Irish botanist and medical biochemist over tea in the home she and her husband built by hand half a century ago in Merrickville, Ontario.  

Beresford-Kroeger has been called “the Jane Goodall of trees,” though she’s also an old-school renaissance woman: over the years, she’s conducted scientific research on organ transplants and open-heart surgery, cloned endangered trees for her forest genome project, and studied the plant aerosols that she says make forests a “living library of medicine.”  

Having just published her eighth book, Our Green Heart: The Soul and Science of Forests, she’s made it her life’s work to educate the rest of us – from schoolchildren to world leaders – on how none of us would be here without trees. “They are the top and the bottom of the pyramid of life,” she writes, explaining how the molecules of decaying leaves reach the oceans to feed fish and whale calves and how the “fingers of the forest touch the atmosphere and dip into the human heart to keep it pumping.”  

In early September, speaking at the Eden Mills Writers’ Festival an hour outside Toronto, she’s frank about what’s at stake in a world with fewer trees. “The oxygen that is in the atmosphere does not come from a mysterious place. It doesn’t come from fairyland. It comes from the bloody trees over your head right now,” she says to a chuckling audience. 

The problem: “We’ve only been so stupid as to cut down the global forests . . . So it means there’s less oxygen in the air and more carbon dioxide. Today, we have [roughly] 420 parts per million of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. The last time it was like that was millions of years ago. We’re heading to danger.”  

Beresford-Kroeger was first warned about climate change in the ’60s by her uncle Pat. As an orphan growing up in Ireland, the self-described “aristocratic mongrel” immersed herself in her uncle’s library and spent summers on her great-aunt’s farm in the Lisheens valley.  

“I inherited knowledge rather than money,” she laughs, explaining that she received an ancient Druidic education, instructed in Celtic knowledge of plants, nature and the sacred importance of trees. Later, she was told to go to the New World to become “as educated as she possibly could” and teach people about the value of nature to help humanity shed our destructive ways. 

Roughly 10 million hectares of forest are cut down every year around the globe, according to the United Nations. Foresters would make the case that they’re replanting trees, sometimes at a two-to-one rate. The hitch: “We are planting the wrong trees in the wrong place.” It’s like, she says, hoping for a donkey to win the Kentucky Derby.  

And, she explains, we’re paying the price with more destructive fires. Up the western seaboard, for thousands of years, giant redwoods acted as a great green firewall – until they began to come down and get replaced with non-native trees like eucalyptus in California and Scots pine in Canada.  

“The species of North America are used to fires, but not to eucalyptus fires, not to Scots pine fires,” she says. “It’s an inferno.” 

She knows from experience the impact of planting the wrong trees in the wrong place. A decade after Beresford-Kroeger moved up to Canada from the United States in the 1970s to work at the University of Ottawa as a research scientist, she and her husband bought a neighbouring plantation of Pinus banksiana – a non-native Jack pine from the Boreal north – hoping to put an end to chemical pesticide use on the property

The species of North America are used to fires, but not to eucalyptus fires, not to Scots pine fires. It’s an inferno.

“They’re not trees. They’re a fire hazard,” she says of the monoculture woods lining her kilometre-long driveway. Being the scientist she is, she also sees them as a bigger blackboard for her research on the climate crisis. For decades, she’s been tinkering in her research garden, planting what she calls a Noah’s ark of thousands of rare and endangered trees, like the native pawpaw, the cucumber tree (Canada’s only native magnolia) and the mighty kingnut (which she says would double the plant-based protein of any farming operation). The kingnut was wiped out in wartime for use as sailing masts, she says, pointing to the “little darling” she grew from seed on a tour of her forest gardens. She’s gathering seeds from the most climate-resilient of her trees. “I’ll find people to take them and to grow them.”

 It all plays into the larger “bioplan” she has for us. Step one of the bioplan: stop cutting down ancient virgin forests. These mother trees are survivors – they are grandparents that hold in their DNA the knowledge of how to weather hundreds, even thousands, of years of climate hardship, as well as vital medicines still being discovered by scientists. But in British Columbia, for instance, ecologists say that just 3% to 20% of old-growth trees – more than 250 years old – are still standing, despite promises from the provincial government.  

Step two: plant the right trees in the right place; one native tree per person per year over the next six years for a global total of 50 billion trees by 2030. “That will start reversing the CO2 in the atmosphere in parts per million down into the three hundreds.”  

In recent years, politicians in Canada, the United States and other countries have promised to plant billions of trees to counter rising carbon in the atmosphere, but, Beresford-Kroeger says, they’re failing. “Climate change is too important [to be left to] politicians. It has to be in the hands of people.” 

We must plant native trees, one per person per year for the next six years. That will start reversing the CO2 in the atmosphere.

Our Green Heart weighs in on solutions for industry, too. Beresford-Kroeger is optimistic about direct carbon capture – nascent technology pulling carbon from the air – to turn planet-warming gases into hydrocarbon fuels for cars, planes and tractors. “All of nature’s currency is carbon. So what you’re doing is you’re using some of nature’s carbon currency. As long as you’re not abusing it, it can be managed harmoniously.”  

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But she slams geoengineering – climate engineering that involves the likes of shooting fine dust into the upper stratosphere to reflect sunlight back to space – as arrogance of the highest order. Especially when the very service of shielding the earth against sunlight is easily provided by the clouds that form in part through moisture released from the globe’s forests. Although in places like the Amazon, so much forest has been cut down that rain clouds have been vanishing, drying up riverbeds and dragging out a historic drought that’s fuelling South America’s fires. 

When I ask what she thinks of companies using tree-planting as a shell game to offset their polluting emissions, she says that if carbon-intensive industries are having a hard time curbing emissions, they should be tapping young minds at universities for the most innovative solutions.  

Education is step three of her bioplan. She’s looking for ambassadors to help her spread her message. “I’ve written all of these books,” she says. “I can only do so much. I want to get the message out there to people: they’ve got to pay attention to nature. It tears me apart that I know that window of opportunity is closing and I won’t be around.” 

As we finish our tea, I ask if she has hope for us. “Oh, yeah!” she says, lighting up. “What I have is hope in the young people. There are some extraordinary young people who are doing incredible things.” 

And for the rest of us, there is still time to turn over a new leaf.

Adria Vasil is the managing editor of Corporate Knights and the author of the Ecoholic book series.

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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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Carbon offset projects, including those from forests, aren’t perfect. In fact, there is a history of many such initiatives being revealed as flashy greenwashing endeavours that were built without sufficient assurances about their “additionality” (emission reductions from offsets are “additional” if they happen as a result of a carbon market, and would not have occurred without it). This situation has improved but is still a challenge, with news breaking earlier this year that The Nature Conservancy, creators of some of the biggest forest carbon offset initiatives in the U.S., have undertaken a review of all their projects as a result of concerns that that organization is facilitating the sale of meaningless carbon credits to corporate clients.

The UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) – a group of thousands of scientists from around the world who put forward recommendations that are subject to line-by-line scrutiny – shows that there’s no scenario where we can avoid the worst-case climate breakdown in the next decade without protecting and restoring forest carbon, including through market mechanisms like offsets. To be sure, the scale of necessary drawdown means that we must employ all tools available to us, and quickly – including robust government regulation or incentives and strong market solutions.

That means that rigorous and transparent forest carbon offset projects are going to play a critical role in incentivizing forest management at a scale that will actually help Canada reach its 2030 climate goals. In the Maritimes, forest carbon offset projects could help support the region’s 80,000 small-scale family forest owners conserve and manage almost five million hectares of forests for climate benefit. The alternative is that these forests continue to be decimated as a result of the only markets currently available to landowners: timber markets that drive widespread clearcutting, which only worsens the climate crisis.

Authenticity is key – so here are five ways to get forest carbon offsets right:

1. Let the people most directly affected make the decisions.

   Carbon offset projects should be led by the people most closely connected to them. The regulations and programs governing those offsets, in particular nature-based ones, should also be designed by those same communities. This is how we ensure that carbon offset projects don’t just devolve into corporate greenwashing initiatives – by supporting Indigenous-led conservation and rural community-led projects, with benefits returning to those communities and the ecosystems that surround them.

2. Make them truly additional.

   Close the loopholes, make offsets programs tight, and don’t leave any cracks open for exploitation. To this end, several national conservation organizations and other experts have said that correct and authentic accounting of the emissions that are driving demand for offsets is important, as is having a clear process on the supply side to verify the authenticity of offsets that are being sold. That means using top protocols, such as those created by long-operating standards associations like Verra and Gold Standard, and closely scrutinizing proposed projects (including third-party verifiers) to ensure that the offsets that are being sold are genuinely additional.

3. Don’t be complacent.

   Climate science and the carbon offsets space are both highly dynamic, and protocols and methodologies are constantly improving. Accept that the protocols that work well today may be improved upon and changed tomorrow – and that’s okay. For example, we’re finally seeing protocols and programs that actually ensure benefits to forest owners and communities, rather than just large corporate interests.

4. The goal should be drawdown, not just net-zero.

   Focusing on “offsets” implies only neutralizing emissions that are currently being produced; it doesn’t address the backlog of historic greenhouse gas emissions that are already in the atmosphere and driving the climate crisis. To make a measurable impact on the climate, we need a drawdown of those historic pollutants, and we need to be carbon-negative. Robust government regulations can drive this, as can more aggressive offsetting programs. With less than a decade left to avoid worst-case climate catastrophe, being net-zero just isn’t good enough.

5. Embed goals of addressing the twin crises of biodiversity loss and climate change.

   Any climate solutions, including carbon offsets, that don’t also protect natural ecosystems and halt the rapid loss of biodiversity are a failure. Globally, we are experiencing the sixth cataclysmic extinction event in history, this one caused by humans. In Canada alone, we have experienced a 68% average decline of birds, amphibians, mammals, fish and reptiles since 1970, a loss that is estimated will be a US$10-trillion hit to the world economy by 2050 under our current “business-as-usual” trajectory. We need nature-based solutions, including carbon offset programs, that directly address habitat loss and destruction of ecosystem services. Otherwise we’re still losing the battle.

All this is to say that carbon offsets, while still imperfect, are one necessary tool in the toolbox of solutions for mitigating, even reversing, climate chaos. And we need all the tools we can lay our hands on, immediately – that’s how we’ll make meaningful gains toward our Paris Agreement goals, and toward a resilient future.

Megan de Graaf (she/her) is a forest ecologist and the Forest Program Director at Community Forests International, and a farm and forest owner in southern New Brunswick, on traditional and unceded Mi’kmaq territory. 

The post Five ways to ensure your forest carbon offsets aren’t just corporate greenwash appeared first on Corporate Knights.

Natalia Moudrak, Director of Climate Resilience, Intact Centre on Climate Adaptation

Robyn Seetal, Principal, IkTaar Sustainability

David Steuerman, Deputy Director, Global Affairs Canada

Mike Puddister, Director, Restoration and Stewardship at Credit Valley Conservation

Roy Brooke, Executive Director, Municipal Natural Assets Initiative

Beyond the immediate health and economic impacts of the COVID-19 crisis, one of the most pressing threats facing Canada and the world is the degradation of nature, incontrovertibly exacerbated by climate change.

The emerging ecological disaster has been matched by an increasingly destabilized global economy and gaping inequality, which have fuelled destructive populist politics that are threatening the core of many established democracies. Our relationship with nature has put civilization on a dangerous path, one that has us testing the limits of our planet. As we recover from the pandemic, we have an opportunity to create a new normal. One fundamental challenge will be ensuring that nature is understood to be of core importance to business models – ­and that its value is properly accounted.

Current measures of GDP are often distorting. Economic activity, whether productive or destructive, is seen as a positive and encouraged. Our approach to our personal bank accounts is quite different: money comes in (salary, benefits, other income) and money goes out (taxes, rent, food, etc). If the latter consistently exceeds the former, the account is depleted and we risk spiralling into debt and bankruptcy. Shift that framing to a global model, replace bankruptcy with ecosystem, societal and economic collapse, and we get a clearer picture of the value of green accounting.

A lot of groundwork has already been laid.

NGOs and numerous other organizations have emerged to provide guidance to reporting organizations and users, including the Sustainability Accounting Standards Board (SASB), the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI), the Task Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosures (TCFD), the Corporate Reporting Dialogue and the International Integrated Reporting Council (IIRC). These organizations have developed environmental reporting standards for the calculation and disclosure of environmental metrics.

Additionally, there has been significant documentation of the process for gathering data, converting company-level results to impacts and dependencies, and selecting prices by, among others, the Capitals Coalition, ISO 14007 and 14008 protocols, and the Impact Institute.

There are also many examples of financial institutions (Impax, ASN, Manulife, etc.) and companies (Kering, BASF, etc.) that have begun piloting valuation and integrating natural capital into decision making.

A number of Canadian municipalities have begun the shift to a new normal, one that recognizes that nature is our most vital asset. They are measuring, valuing, investing in and ultimately managing natural assets such as forests, wetlands and foreshores for the vital municipal service-delivery benefits they offer, such as storm water management, drinking water filtration and coastal zone protection. A key organization driving this effort is the Municipal Natural Assets Initiative (MNAI), which helps local governments understand and manage natural assets within their core financial and asset systems just as they would with critical engineered alternatives.

MNAI’s findings are particularly illustrative of the value that natural assets offer for climate resilience. It has found, for instance, that a seven-kilometre riverbank in the Oshawa Creek watershed in Ontario provides $18.9 million of stormwater conveyance benefit to nearby communities that would otherwise require an engineered solution. Naturally occurring ponds in White Tower Park in Gibsons, B.C., provide $3.5 to $4 million of stormwater storage services annually.

MNAI works directly with municipal governments, creating norms and tools that allow natural asset management to become mainstream practice for local governments across Canada.

Clearly, natural infrastructure assets play a role in climate resilience, and their contributions can be quantified in dollars and cents. In 2016, a framework was established by the Intact Centre on Climate Adaptation (University of Waterloo), Insurance Bureau of Canada and the International Institute for Sustainable Development to help assess this contribution.
Public sector financial statements, however, have not yet recognized natural infrastructure as a valuable asset. A prohibition in the CPA Canada Public Sector Accounting Handbook (Financial Statement Concepts, Section PS 1000, Paragraph .57), states:

“Purchased natural resources and Crown lands are recognized in government financial statements. However, when natural resources and Crown lands have been inherited by the government in right of the Crown and have not been purchased, they are not given accounting recognition as assets in government financial statements. These items are not recognized as assets because the costs, benefits and economic value of such items cannot be reasonably and verifiably quantified using existing methods.”

While this exclusion results in conservative financial reporting, it also means that financial statement users have no way of knowing the extent or value of natural infrastructure assets, and how they might contribute to a public sector entity’s future ability to provide services. Financial statement users also have no transparency concerning any potential changes in the value of these natural assets. This creates a dichotomy in public sector financial reporting.

If, for instance, a municipality has vast natural resources, such as wetlands, forests and ponds, it’s prohibited from reflecting those as an asset on its financial statements. The municipality is also not required to report in its financial statements whether those natural resources have been damaged by pollution. This lack of transparency ultimately results in less accountability for safeguarding natural resources.
Recent statistics suggest that the loss of natural infrastructure in Canada is already a pressing problem. In southern Ontario, an estimated 72% of the original wetlands have been lost to development (e.g., agriculture, urban sprawl and other land conversion). In Alberta, approximately 64% of the original wetlands in settled areas no longer exist. In B.C., more than 70% of the original wetlands have disappeared in the lower Fraser Valley and parts of Vancouver Island, and an 85% wetland loss has been documented in the South Okanagan.

Conversely, allowing public sector entities to account for natural assets would make financial statements more transparent and would improve accountability on preserving the natural infrastructure that society and businesses rely on.

As Canada advances its climate commitments made under the Paris Agreement, the United Nations’ Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction, and the Pan-Canadian Framework on Clean Growth and Climate Change, it needs to revise its accounting rules to enable public sector entities to use natural infrastructure for climate change mitigation and adaptation. If it does not change its internal accounting rules, Canada’s natural assets will continue to degrade and disappear – and the costs of climate catastrophes will continue to climb.

Nevertheless, most companies are in the dark when it comes to accounting for their impacts and dependencies on the environment, and investors struggle to compare what little disclosure there is in a meaningful way.

Many businesses look at this as a form of corporate social responsibility (CSR) rather than as central to their way of operating. As a result, they make only cosmetic changes or apply green accounting to side projects – but don’t touch their core enterprise management systems. In addition, many of these changes don’t extend to supply chains, which are responsible for most of the impacts. Even when they do, the generally small to medium-sized enterprises on the lower tier of the supply chain will be ill-equipped to take meaningful action. A mixture of economic and technical support and meaningful regulations will be necessary to encourage and enable the changes needed. This will also require some degree of cooperation at the international level, to establish universal standards (an exercise for the UN, the World Trade Organization and various regional trade forums to work on).

How do we close the gap?

The Capitals Coalition is a global group – encompassing many larger companies, governments, international organizations and standards bodies – that shares knowledge from around the world, establishes global standards and advocates to convince the various players to synchronize their efforts. It has also developed a series of protocols that combine current thinking from different organizations.

There is a strong interest in getting Canadian governments, companies and standards bodies more deeply involved in the work of the Capitals Coalition. To this end, a series of roundtables in Ottawa and Toronto are being planned to bring together stakeholders to share information and best practices. Ideally, this will result in the development of a Canadian chapter of the coalition, which will allow for more regular sharing of information and ensure that Canada is represented in the work of the Capitals Coalition globally.

The Value Balancing Alliance (VBA, a new business-led non-profit) is standardizing the process of integrating business into society and nature for better decision-making, as part of the work being done by the Capitals Coalition. In line with the European Green Deal, the VBA has been tasked by the European Commission to develop generally accepted accounting principles and guidelines around environmental impacts for business. This is expected to soon lead to a common standard (which consolidates numerous other initiatives) for measuring and valuing environmental impacts in monetary terms.

This summer, the VBA will make public an early version of a methodological tool for companies to measure their impacts on society: environmental boundaries, social stability and inclusion, and economic prosperity. This will be followed in September by a version that integrates public reporting tools to assess an enterprise’s value more comprehensively, including additions for social capital, human capital, natural capital and governance.

Working closely with the Capitals Coalition is the Impact Management Project, helping investors measure and report the impacts of their investments.

What would it take to create a new normal in which the economic subsystem operates in symbiosis with the larger planetary and societal system that makes life on Earth possible?

1. A few things are required for this to happen within the market system:

Redefine prosperity and adapt our measures of success

• We must view ourselves as part of nature and part of a world that depends on nature.
• We must address the blind spots that are not covered by GDP, the main metric for prosperity, by incorporating comprehensive wealth, or a capitals approach to measuring, valuing and reporting on prosperity and success.

2. Update our accounting standards and develop related guidance

We need tools for accountants to value nature so it can be properly accounted for in income statements and balance sheets, starting with large corporations and governments all the way down to small businesses and individuals. Practically, this will require major accounting standard-setting bodies (critically the International Accounting Standards Board and the Financial Accounting Standards Board) to adopt accounting-for-nature principles and detailed guidance to enable implementation.

3. Establish supporting regulations

We need governments to establish the rules to close the gap between a company’s environmental profit and loss (EP&L) account and actual profit and loss, perhaps through regulatory support of integrated reporting.

4. Re-allocate capital

We need to incentivize investors to re-allocate investments in companies, taking multi-capitals into account and providing a net-positive value to nature, society and the economy.

As Peter Drucker famously said, “What gets measured, gets managed.” Let’s get on with measuring the one asset on which all other assets rely upon.

Watch our Valuing Nature roundtable, recorded May 22, 2020.

 Other relevant initiatives working on more holistic measurement of business value and impact:

● Impact-Weighted Accounts initiative out of Harvard Business School
● European Commission sustainable taxonomy
● World Economic Forum initiative to come up with common metrics for reporting sustainable value creation
● Accounting for Sustainability, a program of The Prince of Wales’s Charitable Foundation (PWCF)
● The Canadian Public Sector Accounting Board has convened a technical working group to address the exclusion of natural assets

The post It’s time for our financial statements to reflect the vital value of nature appeared first on Corporate Knights.

In an online roundtable Wednesday, experts urged the federal government to dramatically scale up its support for nature-based climate solutions.

The approach would not only contribute to the country’s effort to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions; it would protect nature, create jobs, provide additional income to struggling farmers and promote reconciliation with Indigenous communities, a white paper produced for the session by Ralph Torrie of Torrie Smith Associates and Céline Bak of Analytica Advisors concluded.

Currently, Canada is one of only a few major economies that do not incorporate the value of environmental services provided by forests, wetlands and farms into their agricultural policies.

The session on forestry and farming was hosted by Corporate Knights as part of its seven-part Building Back Better event series. It was held amid growing calls for the Liberal government to ensure that its planned post-COVID stimulus program serves to accelerate the country’s transition to a low-carbon economy.

“Because forests and land can sequester carbon and because of the sheer scale of Canada’s land mass, nature-based climate solutions can have a material impact on both the climate and biodiversity crises,” the authors wrote in their discussion paper.

They noted that the Liberal government proposes to set aside 30% of Canada’s land and 30% of oceans for conservation by 2030.

The white paper proposed a number of measures to scale up the current efforts to plant trees, return marginal farmland to nature and reduce the use of fossil-fuel-based fertilizers on farms.

The measures include:
• $4 billion over 10 years to support farmers in converting 10 million acres of marginal agricultural land to forest, grassland or wetlands. The conservation initiatives would sequester 22 million tonnes of GHG emissions annually and create 5,600 jobs annually.
• $16 billion over 10 years to increase the planned federal tree-planting program from 200 million trees annually to one billion. Planting an additional 800 million trees annually would generate 15,000 jobs a year and reduce emissions by an average of 30 million tonnes between 2020 and 2050.
• $200 million over 18 months to provide incentives for farmers to reduce their use of nitrogen-based fertilizer. The transition would reduce farmers’ costs and increase their incomes while creating 2,880 jobs and cutting GHGs by 3.75 million tonnes annually.

In the fight against climate change, government investment in nature and biodiversity is an “essential component that needs to happen, but it is not getting much attention,” David Martin, chair of WWF-Canada, told the virtual roundtable.

Typically, the climate debate has centred on the production and use of energy, and how Canadians can transition off fossil fuels. But agriculture accounts for about one 10th of the country’s GHG emissions, with the majority of that total traceable to production of beef and overuse of nitrogen fertilizer.

“As farm inputs increase, so do farm emissions,” said Darrin Qualman, director of climate crisis policy and action for the National Farmers Union. While financial incentives are important, governments must also support additional agronomists who can work with farmers to reduce their dependence on high-cost fertilizers, he said.

The Canadian forestry sector is already gearing up to meet the Liberal government’s promise to plant 200 million trees a year on land that is not currently forested. (The forestry sector is responsible for replanting where they have cut.)

To increase that planting to one billion trees a year would require a massive commitment to the supply chain – from the nurseries to land owners to the workforce – said Rob Keen, executive director of Forests Ontario. “In order for [the industry] to make that kind of investment, they need a 10-year window of funding,” he said. “It can’t just be a year-by-year line item in the budget.”

While tree planting is an important part of the strategy, governments have to pay at least as much attention to “protecting what we have,” said Tzeporah Berman, international program director for Stand.Earth, an environmental organization.

Practices like clearcutting forests for toilet paper and using wood pellets to generate electricity along with the lack of paper recycling initiatives turn Canada’s forests from a carbon sink into a source of emissions, she noted.

The paper industry’s recycling effort was stalled when municipalities began sending their used paper to Asia, said Magali Depras, chief sustainability officer at Quebec-based TC Transcontinental. Now that Asian nations have stopped taking our waste, Canada has an opportunity to recommit to the circular economy, in which makers of consumer goods reuse recycled raw materials.

Valérie Courtois, of the Indigenous Leadership Initiative, said the government’s focus on nature-based climate solutions has to include Indigenous communities who are already leading the conservation effort.

Her group runs the federally funded Indigenous Guardians program, in which local people monitor ecological health, maintain cultural sites and protect sensitive areas and species.

If the government is going to meet its target of conserving 30% of the land, “it needs to work with Indigenous people, and we are poised to do that,” she said.

Shawn McCarthy writes on sustainable finance and climate for Corporate Knights. He is also senior counsel for Sussex Strategy Group.

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The history of Canada and its people is largely written in the history of its agricultural and forestry ecosystems, and the “pandemic pause” provides an opportunity to assess the health and sustainability of those ecosystems and the economic activity that depends on them. The total industrial harvest of wood in Canada peaked in 2004, and the pandemic hit when the forest industry was in decline. Agricultural practices are clearly not sustainable, and the pandemic has revealed the vulnerability of our food production and supply chains. Forestry and agriculture are both susceptible to the ravages of extreme weather and a destabilized climate, but both sectors have great potential to contribute to a rebalancing of the climate system and the establishment of a green economic recovery.

Canada, with its vast areas of forests, wetlands and farmland, has abundant opportunities to adopt nature-based climate solutions. Conservation, restoration and land management actions can help store carbon and avoid climate-changing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. Approximately 84% of land in Canada is forested (857 million acres), of which 55% (558 million acres) is managed forests. An additional 158 million acres are dedicated to agriculture. Because forests and land can sequester carbon and because of the sheer scale of Canada’s land mass, nature-based climate solutions can have a material impact on both the climate and biodiversity crises.

Globally, more than 11.3 billion tonnes of GHG emissions per year could be avoided or offset by nature-based climate solutions (that is a full third of annual GHG emissions), including afforestation (in areas where there was no previous tree cover), reforesting degraded forests, engaging in responsible forest management and improving cropland and peatland management.

Canada has already committed to a $3 billion Natural Climate Solutions fund: $2 billion to plant 200 million trees per year over 10 years and $1 billion to support other projects that improve the storage of carbon through stewardship of Canada’s forests, wetlands and farmlands. The goal of the fund is to achieve annual emissions reductions of 30 million tonnes by 2030.

According to the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), 7% of 857 million acres, or about 59.3 million acres of Canadian forest, are under some form of conservation. The federal government has committed to protecting 25% of Canada’s land and 25% of our oceans by 2025 – with an ambition of 30% of each by 2030. If achieved, these new protected areas could also contribute to Canada’s efforts to tackle climate change and form the basis of tourism that enables us to deepen our connection with the land as we stay closer to home for recreation and holidays during the COVID-19 pandemic and into the future.

Also firmly rooted in the land and nature, Canada’s agricultural sector is a vitally important part of our economy and our food security. A robust agricultural sector is essential to Canada’s economic recovery. A recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Special Report, Climate Change and Land, stresses that to keep global temperatures within safe levels we need to transform the way we produce food and manage land. Canada reports that the sector accounts for a 10th of the country’s GHG emissions – the majority of those emissions are traceable to beef and overuse of nitrogen fertilizer. If all the parts of our food system are included, from farm inputs to the emissions resulting from wasted food, 25 to 30% of global GHG emissions are attributable to the system that generates our food.

The COVID-19 pandemic has exposed the risks of our heavy reliance on global supply chains and brought heightened awareness to the value of producing food in Canada. For livestock farmers, the pandemic has meant that many of the chickens, pigs, cows and sheep that were bred and raised for food are not finding markets, as meat processing plants are shut down and restaurants, hotels, convention centres and sports venues are shuttered because of the pandemic.

Before COVID-19, about 58% of food produced was lost or wasted, and 32% of this food could have been rescued to support communities across Canada. This is the goal of the federal government’s recently announced $50 million fund to purchase and divert surplus food. COVID-19 has also clearly exposed the reality that many Canadians cannot always afford healthy and nutritious meals, leading to greater reliance on food support programs. The number of Canadians experiencing food insecurity is highest among Black and Indigenous Canadians. With increased poverty caused by COVID-19, the number of Canadians experiencing food insecurity is expected to double from 4.4 to 8.8 million. At a time when so many Canadians are deeply concerned about putting food on the table, it’s striking that the federal relief program for farmers ($252 million) was 15% of the amount announced to subsidize the safe shut-in of wells illegally abandoned by oil and gas companies ($1.7 billion).

Creating incentives for farmers to adopt practices that reduce emissions and conserve biodiversity can make Canadian farms more resilient while creating jobs in local communities. Healthy ecosystems on farmlands provide both ecological goods and services (EGS), with direct economic and cultural benefits, including food, water and timber, as well as services such as  water filtration, flood protection, wildlife habitat and GHG sequestration. Where crops can’t be produced profitably, agricultural land can be put to use for EGS as part of Canada’s green stimulus plan. Doing so will put money in farmers’ pockets and keep much-needed Canadian farms in business.

Planting trees on marginal agricultural lands reduces atmospheric carbon dioxide levels by sequestering carbon. So does restoring wetlands and converting marginal cropland to perennial grassland cover. These are all examples of land use that delivers essential ecological services to society.  Beyond sequestering carbon, they deliver cost-effective natural infrastructure, reducing the impacts of flooding and drought and making water treatment less expensive. Climate-related water disasters are costly, rising to $28 billion between 2000 and 2017. Restoring natural infrastructure also saves money by decreasing damage to roads and other built infrastructure. Communities struggling with the tax revenue losses of COVID-19 can’t afford to spend 80% of their budgets on road maintenance with costs rising due to climate change. Natural infrastructure can help protect roads from flash floods and keep repair costs down.

 

The EU Green Deal’s approach to natural ecosystems 

As an example of international developments on natural ecosystems, the EU Commission (the executive branch of the EU) has included preserving and restoring ecosystems and biodiversity as well as a fair, healthy and environmentally friendly food system as two of the 10 planks of the EU Green Deal. In March of this year, the EU Commission proposed that regulatory and non-regulatory initiatives would enable the achievement of these objectives.

As an indication of the political support the EU Green Deal has garnered, in May the EU Parliament (the legislative branch of the EU) passed a motion with all-party support framing the EU Green deal as the foundation of the EU’s next seven-year budgetary cycle starting 2021. It also stressed the need for new sources of funding above and beyond existing sources and stated that “Parliament has been adamant that the Green Deal and the European digital agenda be a priority in the next long-term budget and the recovery strategy. If its demands are not met, Parliament warns it will make use of its veto powers.”

The Proposal

Given the important role of our forests, wetlands and farmlands for rural employment and in the transition to a net-zero economy, the federal and provincial governments should establish policies and investments that support them if we’re to meet our climate commitments in economically sound ways. These range from protecting larger swaths of forests, wetlands and marine areas, to improving logging and farming practices, to determining credible carbon-offset frameworks. These will take time. In the short term, there are opportunities for Canadians to Build Back Better through Natural Climate Solutions.

Here we focus on three core proposals that can play a role in a resilient recovery:

1. Incentivize farmers to adopt practices that sequester carbon on marginal agricultural land

Of Canada’s 158 million acres of farmland, 93 million are dedicated to crops. A quarter of Canada’s farmland is considered to be marginal land. The potential for sequestering carbon on marginal agricultural land depends on the willingness of farmers across the country to commit to, and invest in, afforestation, restoration and conservation efforts. Such incentive-based programs for farmers and rural-land managers do double duty by both sequestering carbon and delivering valuable natural infrastructure services like flood and watershed protection for nearby large cities and rural towns.

An investment of $400 million per year ($4 billion over 10 years) to support farmers in converting 10 million acres of marginal agricultural land to deliver ecological goods and services (EGS) that would sequester  22 million tonnes of GHG emissions annually by 2025 and create 5,600 jobs annually.

Farmers are already being supported to convert marginal land into new uses that deliver multiple benefits. For example, ALUS Canada works with farmers and ranchers on 27,000 acres of Canadian farmland to produce valuable ecological services, including clean air, clean water, flood mitigation, climate adaptation, carbon sequestration, habitats for species at risk and support for our native bees and pollinators.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, other noteworthy positive impacts of these investments in natural infrastructure include:

• creating more liveable communities and supporting residents;
• retaining and attracting highly educated young professionals to jobs in rural communities;
• engaging rural volunteers;
• introducing urban Canadians to rural communities and farming through media coverage of the important services that farmers and rural communities are providing; and
• increasing property values.

2. Incentivize farmers to use less nitrogen fertilizer, save money and reduce emissions

An additional investment of $200 million over the next 18 months to optimize and reduce nitrogen use on Canadian farms, create 2,800 jobs in hard-hit agricultural communities and reduce GHG emissions by 3.75 million tonnes annually.

Nitrogen fertilizer is the largest source of on-farm emissions. Nitrogen use in Canada has doubled since 1993, driving emissions higher; more than a quarter of all GHG emissions in agriculture stem from fertilizer derived from natural gas. Farmers need help to reduce fertilizer use while maintaining yield by implementing alternatives such as enhanced crop rotations that include more nitrogen-fixing legumes – nature’s fertilizer. Because lowering fertilizer use reduces costs, this investment would in time return $850 million per year to farmers through a 15% reduction in fertilizer use, with commensurate reductions in emissions. Paired with efficiency measures, this 15% reduction in tonnage would have little or no effect on yields. The immediate need is to hire hundreds of independent agrologists who can work in the countryside to help farmers reduce nitrogen use and attendant emissions.

3. Plant 10 billion trees by 2030

Canada has committed to planting two billion trees by 2030. Conservatively estimated, this will reduce emissions by three megatonnes by 2030 and six megatonnes by 2050, with an estimated average cost of $20/tonnes CO2e, and create an estimated 3,500 seasonal jobs each year.

While there are economies of scale involved in tree planting, it’s generally assumed that the cost-per-tonne of carbon emissions avoided rises with the ambition of a tree planting program due to varying absorption capacities of land across Canada.

Assuming that the costs rise in a more ambitious scenario, where the federal government is paying to plant a billion trees per year (an increase of 800 million from the current planned levels of 200 million per year, compared to the forestry industry’s current replacement planting of 500 million trees per year), Dave Sawyer, chief economist for the Canadian Institute for Climate Choices, estimates that the cost per tonne of reduced emissions on an annualized basis between 2020 and 2050 would be about $30/tonne CO2e.

The carbon benefits from planting trees will start slowly but grow quickly in the critical 2030 to 2050 period, when they can make an important contribution to flattening the GHG-emissions curve. Planting trees can also help restore degraded lands, increase tree cover in urban areas and improve ecosystem function on marginal agricultural lands. If the right types of land are targeted, that planting can create habitat for species at risk and other wildlife, provide relief from floods and prevent soil erosion, all in addition to sequestering and storing carbon. Urban forests can reduce temperatures in the summer (thus helping cities adapt to climate change), clean the air, improve water filtration, reduce stormwater runoff, promote physical activity and mental well-being, and reduce buildings’ heating costs.

As part of a resilient recovery, the commitment to plant two billion trees by 2030 could be scaled up to 10 billion trees. This could be done by putting an additional $16 billion into the Natural Climate Solutions fund over the next 10 years to plant an additional 800 million trees per year. 

To give an indication of the impact this would have, using data from Forests Ontario that attributes 8.2 jobs per million dollars invested in tree planting, a $1.6 billion federal spend to plant the additional 800 million trees per year would generate 15,000 full-time jobs per year, including 8,000 seasonal jobs for young tree-planters.

The effectiveness of an expanded tree-planting program will depend on carefully identifying where to plant. The impact of tree planting on the albedo effect (solar radiation reflected by surfaces) in northern areas, and the impact of increased forest fires as a result of climate change, need to be factored in. Also, biodiversity considerations need to be paired with climate considerations – reforesting a degraded area that was previously forested can have a positive impact on both, whereas foresting a native grassland can have both a positive climate impact and a significantly negative biodiversity impact. As well, the ability of trees to grow and thrive where planted, the degree to which planted trees are protected into the future and the ability of seedling suppliers to scale up all need to be incorporated into the design of the program.

Complementary policies

In addition to these two proposed investments, implementing other policies to support nature-based climate solutions will be important for achieving our climate and biodiversity goals.

First, the federal government needs to deliver on its commitment to protect 25% of Canada’s land and 25% of our oceans by 2025 – with an ambition of 30% of each by 2030. This will protect important ecosystems and biodiversity and contribute to Canada’s efforts to fight climate change. Protecting more of our land and oceans can also support nature-based tourism, for which there may be a growing market among Canadians following the pandemic’s impact on air travel. As with the recommendations we made in the industry white paper (to pay a carbon rebate of $100/tonne of avoided emissions for steel used in public infrastructure), the federal government could extend a similar premium for Forest Stewardship Council–certified wood products to reflect the locked-in carbon savings versus conventional materials.

Indigenous Protected and Conservation Areas – lands and waters where Indigenous governments have the primary role in protecting and conserving ecosystems through Indigenous laws, governance and knowledge systems – will be an important part of achieving the commitment. They represent a modern application of traditional values, Indigenous laws and Indigenous knowledge systems, an exercise in cultural continuity on the land and waters and a foundation for local Indigenous economies.

Second, in addition to tree planting, the Natural Climate Solutions fund is intended to support projects brought forward by communities, provinces, private landowners and businesses to reduce emissions from forests, wetlands and farmland. This is an opportunity for the federal government to support innovative projects that can be good for the climate, biodiversity and local communities. It could build from the example of the Great Bear Initiative, led by the Coastal First Nations in B.C., where conservation, local economic development and carbon management have been achieved in tandem. It has resulted in a first-of-its-kind carbon offset project, where the First Nations have the ownership and right to sell carbon offsets from their territories.

Projects supported by the Natural Climate Solutions fund will need to result in emissions reductions that are real, permanent, additional, verifiable and avoid leakage.

Research suggests that care must be taken to ensure that new climate-related agricultural policies are grounded in science. The National Farmers Union estimates that agricultural emissions could be cut by 30% by 2030 and 50% by 2050 using practices and technologies that exist today. These include changing the way farmers seed, control weeds, manage soil health, till and plough; moving from gas to electricity to power on-farm vehicles and equipment; and changing how livestock graze and how compost and manure are handled.

These changes can also boost farm profitability by cutting costs, increasing employment with more labour-intensive practices and improving water quality and soil health.

Forestry and agriculture sustained life in Canada long before the arrival of Europeans and long before the disruption of the fossil fuel era. As we turn our attention to how we can rebuild our economy, foresters and farmers have critical roles to play. For as little as 0.1% of annual GDP, Canada can rejuvenate its forest and agricultural ecosystems while at the same time creating thousands of jobs in hard-hit rural communities as we Build Back Better.

Ralph Torrie is senior associate with Sustainability Solutions Group and partner at Torrie Smith Associates.

Céline Bak is the founder and president of Analytica Advisors.

Notice to reader: Please be aware some of the figures and other details in this white paper have been updated in the Final Report to reflect feedback.

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That simple, powerful message came out of the World Economic Forum in January, as billionaires and high-ranking politicians gathered to discuss ways to keep our increasingly unstable climate from becoming unlivable.

Think COVID-19 is bad? In many ways, the current pandemic is a taste of what’s to come if we don’t dramatically reduce atmospheric CO2 emissions over the next 30 years. COVID-19 may have temporarily pushed talk of climate action to the margins, but the risks of a warming world remain.

Which brings us back to trees. Trees are humanity’s greatest allies in the fight against climate change, so when planting a trillion of them becomes a call to action for government leaders and multibillionaires, we can only hope they’ll follow through – even in a world currently seized by crisis. That includes Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s own pledge to plant two billion trees over the next decade.

The reality is that our forests and woodlands are already under extreme stress, whether as a result of deforestation or wildfires and disease made worse by climate change. One need only look to the recent devastation in Australia, and earlier wildfires in Alberta and California, to see we have a big problem.

In the journal Science last summer, researchers estimated that there’s room on this planet – if we exclude existing urban and agricultural areas – to restore nearly a billion hectares of tree canopy. Doing so, they calculated, could store more than 200 gigatonnes of carbon, or about a quarter of the carbon currently in our atmosphere in the form of heat-trapping gases like CO2 and methane.

Put another way, it would be like removing two-thirds of the CO2 humans have dumped into the atmosphere since the Industrial Revolution. “This highlights global tree restoration as one of the most effective carbon drawdown solutions to date,” the researchers wrote.

Effective, yes, but let’s not underestimate the challenge.

Tree planting isn’t as simple as people might think. Tree planters, often summer students, experience a 25% injury rate, among the highest of almost any industry. Increasingly, these students are exposed to ticks and mosquitos that carry diseases like Lyme and West Nile virus.

Tree planting companies also require a lot of labour, as well as the infrastructure required to support it. The camps set up to support workers need kitchen trailers, showers, sleeping tents, portable toilets, drinking water, fuel, first aid rooms and other amenities – even satellite internet – and that comes at a significant cost.

There’s also a big shortage of labour most years because of the difficult nature of the job. Hauling around bags loaded with seedlings and constantly squatting in the sun while digging with a shovel is exhausting work, made worse by the swarms of blackflies and mosquitoes that make DEET your best friend.

It’s for this reason that folks like Bryce Jones, co-founder and CEO of Toronto-based Flash Forest, are working hard to develop new approaches to tree planting. Jones says all current reforestation efforts fall radically short of the true need. “If the tree-planting targets announced by federal governments in Canada, the U.S., New Zealand and Australia are going to be met, innovation will be necessary.”

Flash Forest, for example, is betting that drones will be an essential part of the solution. The company uses advanced 3D mapping technology and an enhanced fleet of aerial drones to plant trees 10 times faster than conventional approaches and at one-fifth the cost.

Each of its drones is operated by a pilot from the ground and equipped with a pneumatic firing device that shoots seed pods into the soil. The pods are made up of germinated seeds surrounded by a biodegradable, moisture-retaining casing that contains everything the seeds need to flourish, including beneficial acids, nutrients and fungi that promote healthy growth.

And each drone can carry a mix of pods, assuring that multiple types of native trees are planted, rather than monocultures that threaten biodiversity.

But it’s the numbers that are most compelling. With conventional tree planting, one person working 10-hour days could theoretically plant seven million trees over the course of a decade. To hit a trillion trees would require 143,000 people working non-stop – people who need to be put up in camps, fed and paid.

Alternatively, the same goal could be reached using just 2,800 aerial drones, each operated by a single pilot driving around in a pickup truck. How’s that for productivity in the age of self-isolation?

This example highlights the crucial role that automation, robotics, artificial intelligence and other advanced technologies will need to play to achieve the kind of greenhouse gas reductions needed to keep our climate livable.

Ambitious targets are welcome, but they’ll be meaningless unless we can properly harness the power of machines to make up for time that humanity has wasted.

Tyler Hamilton works with cleantech companies across Canada as an advisor with the non-profit MaRS Discovery District in Toronto. He is also on the board of the Ontario Clean Technology Industry Association.

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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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But since images of wildfires ravaging the Amazon rainforest captured global hearts and minds, efforts to reforest the planet have taken centre stage. Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg began urging political leaders in Canada and around the globe to look to tree planting as part of a Natural Climate Solutions campaign to tackle global heating. Adding fuel to the tree-planting fire, a Swiss study published in the journal Science made waves when it concluded that planting 1.2 trillion trees worldwide could absorb and store an astonishing 205 gigatonnes – effectively removing two-thirds of all human-made carbon from the atmosphere, once those trees fully mature.

Keeping a trillion young trees alive all the way to maturity in the face of climate-change-aggravated droughts, wildfires and pests, as well as human pressures, will be an enormous challenge. As well, the Guardian’s George Monbiot (a founder of the Natural Climate Solutions campaign) recently cautioned that “in many places rewilding, or natural regeneration – allowing trees to seed and spread themselves – is much faster and more effective, and tends to produce far richer habitats.”

Regardless, the wave of mass tree-planting pledges has begun. Here’s a sampling of the latest initiatives:

• Ireland plans to plant 22 million trees every year for the next 20 years, totalling 440 million trees.

• New Zealand aims to plant a billion trees by 2028.

• A record-breaking 350 million trees were reportedly planted on a single day in July in Ethiopia, as part of a push to plant four billion trees there by October.

• Pakistan has committed to planting 10 billion trees over the next five to eight years.

• More than 20 African countries are in the midst of planting a Great Green Wall, with plans to reforest 247 million acres of degraded land.

• In Canada, the federal Liberal Party promised, if re-elected, to use revenues from the Trans Mountain Pipeline to pay for two billion trees to be planted.

Not that tree planting should negate efforts to decarbonize the economy, but as Swiss researcher Jean-François Bastin says, “Governments must now factor [tree restoration] into their national strategies.”

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To put that number in perspective, if a rich country like Canada were to invest 1% of its GDP planting new trees over a period of just eight years, it could remove up to half of the heat-trapping greenhouse gases (GHGs) that have been deposited by humankind in the atmosphere since the Industrial Revolution.

Former ExxonMobil scientist Dr. M. Stanley Whittingham also won a Nobel prize this year for his pioneering work in the development of the lithium-ion battery for the company in the 1970s. In its citation for the prize, The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said: “This light-weight, rechargeable and powerful battery is now used in everything from mobile phones to laptops and electric vehicles. It can also store significant amounts of energy from solar and wind power, making possible a fossil fuel-free society.”

For whatever reason, after Whittingham’s initial breakthrough, Exxon put the rechargeable battery project on ice, citing high manufacturing costs and safety concerns.

That wasn’t the only time Exxon scientists developed potential breakthrough technologies to decarbonize the global economy. Exxon holds more low-carbon patents than any company on the planet, according to a Chatham House report.

Exxon’s annual sales are more than triple Ethiopia’s GDP. One wonders how different the world would be had the company invested its vast resources in a better future rather than holding it back. Exxon’s shareholders should be asking this question too. Over the past 10 years, Exxon’s stock has been a dog, returning just one dollar for every six generated by an equivalent investment in the broader U.S. stock market.

The reason for this is the best news possible: economics. The low-carbon way is now the better, cheaper way. This is true across a host of critical technologies from electric vehicles to renewable power and storage.

To wit: A recent report by BNP Paribas Asset Management (which has US$469 billion in assets under management) found that oil needs a long-term breakeven price of $10–$20 per barrel to remain competitive in mobility, which accounts for more than a third of demand for crude oil. The report concludes the “economics of oil for gasoline and diesel vehicles versus wind- and solar-powered electric vehicles are now in relentless and irreversible decline, with far-reaching implications for both policymakers and the oil majors.”

It’s good news that investors are waking up to the greatest threat to humanity, and even better news that it is for economic reasons, as that suggests the possibility of a massive scale-down of financing of climate problems in favour of climate solutions. But it’s not happening fast enough.

It’s as if our house is on fire and we are waiting for the boxing day sale on sprinklers.

We need to turn the firehose on. For decades, dealing with climate change (now a climate emergency) has been a massive collective action problem with little incentive to be a first mover, because it has been viewed as an environmental problem. Any single actor (with the exception of China or the U.S.) could not hope to make more than a dent on their own, and the benefits would not be reaped for decades into the future.

But when viewed through the lens of economics, the first mover disadvantage becomes an advantage. Those who lead the race to the rising low carbon economy stand to reap the biggest gains.

Which brings us to Canada, eh. With our energy industry on the ropes and struggling to remain relevant in what Shell CEO Ben van Beurden describes as a “lower forever” oil price world, the sooner we change our mindset to see the low-carbon economy as something to fight for rather than against the better.

Ditto for the rest of our economy — from the beleaguered internal combustion auto sector and energy-inefficient heavy industry to buildings and the balkanized electrical grid — embracing the opportunities of a low-carbon economy could bring our country together instead of driving it apart.

But it will take a serious chunk of change: about $300 billion over the next six years, according to The Capital Plan for Clean Prosperity, a Corporate Knights report for the Council for Clean Capitalism.

The simplest most effective way to move Canada to the front of the global low-carbon economic expansion would be for the federal government to initiate a large clean stimulus package backed by an annual $50 billion green bond program that would provide grants for businesses to deploy climate solutions.

As the global economy enters a period of contraction, the timing for such a stimulus could not be better.

Using the best models available, such a bold move could add as many as 900,000 jobs and $700 billion of GDP growth over six years.

Unlike Ethiopia we have abundant means to do this. A $300 billion pot of free money would focus the imagination of Canadian businesses. We should not underestimate our ability to capitalize on the awesome low-carbon growth opportunity.

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