What Can Go Wrong W. Carbon Credits For Planting Trees? Oh, Plenty As Big Oil's Greenwashing Shows
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In 2019, Shell paid the Dutch Forestry Commission (Staatsbosbeheer) €17.4 million to plant five million trees over the next 12 years, in areas where an aggressive fungal disease had destroyed the ash tree population. Shell’s press release clearly stated that both projects are “expected to generate carbon credits within five years”. This appears to be speculation, however, as a Dutch Forestry Commission spokesman acknowledged that the plan was “a work in progress and credits are not yet possible”. That’s because the EU’s Land Use, Land Use Change and Forestry (LULUCF) regulation means all emissions savings from forestry and land use (FALU) projects in the EU are channelled into meeting national climate targets (NDCs), and cannot be counted towards corporate goals.
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But Kelsey Perlman, a forest and climate campaigner at NGO Fern, told DeSmog that “creating an offsetting scheme would raise huge questions on compatibility with existing laws and be a terrible step backwards for a country that presents itself as a climate leader.” That’s because if Shell’s projects go towards reducing emissions under the Netherlands’ national targets, this raises the risk that those savings could be counted twice — towards both the national goal and Shell’s own target. “There is no way of separating out individual tree planting projects and so to sell them, when there is a high likelihood that these activities go to fulfilling the regulation, is a likely double counting,” Perlman said. “Not to mention that it would then be used to justify pollution elsewhere, which is the whole reason the regulation was kept separate from other sectors,” she added.
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In 2012, the Staatsbosbeheer was forced to create its own income after government funding cuts. Since then, the agency has overseen the loss of more forest annually than has been newly planted, and has faced controversy for selling off wood for bio-energy generation. Simply put, Shell’s $17.4 million cheque got the service out of a financial fix. But that financial benefit came with a heavy cost, as the Dutch press and public lost confidence in the agency. A Shell spokesperson defended the collaboration, saying that “addressing a challenge as big as climate change requires a truly collaborative, society-wide approach,” and that the company is “committed to playing our part, by addressing our own emissions and helping customers to reduce theirs.” But despite Shell’s assurances, the Dutch press were quick to raise concerns about the forestry commission’s decision to team up with Europe’s biggest polluter. “This partnership is crying out for answers,” read an editorial in Dutch newspaper Trouw. “Isn’t Staatsbosbeheer getting tied up in a Shell PR strategy? Whatever will happen next?”
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Future misuse or destruction of that land could reverse any offsets companies claim today, as the equivalent tonnage in carbon stored in these trees is likely to have been ‘spent’ a long time before this happens — through offsetting programmes such as Shell’s Drive Carbon Neutral initiative. This is not a new concern. Former director of Rainforest Foundation UK, Simon Counsell, was among a group of environmental NGOs working in tropical forests who wrote to the World Bank in 2017, expressing concern over the role Redd+ was playing in offsetting global emissions. Counsell, co-founder of environmental watchdog Redd Monitor, laments the “many vested interests throwing money at the projects.” He told DeSmog: “If you look at hundreds of Redd+ projects, none of them have actually worked.” “At best what happens is that you stop deforestation in one area but it’s moved somewhere else. You have to protect the projects in perpetuity.”
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https://www.desmog.co.uk/2020/07/06/big-oil-forest-fever
