offset CO2 with the World Land Trust

It is now beyond reasonable doubt that a degree of climate change is inevitable, and the question is not how to prevent it but how to minimise its impacts. The urgent need is to slow down and then reverse the rise in atmospheric CO2 level. Reducing emissions is the first obvious step, which, inevitably, involves changes in lifestyles and business practices. Another way is to actively prevent the release of stored CO2, usually through 'avoided deforestation'. Alternatively one can offset, neutralising the emissions that are going into the atmosphere by taking action to re-absorb them.

Some people are critical of offsetting, saying that it is little more than a way of paying to avoid changing behaviour. This may be so. On the other hand the situation is urgent, human nature is often slow to make change and we need to use all the tools to hand. WLT, therefore, recommends emissions reductions while also urging individuals and businesses to offset their emissions which they cannot eliminate. The World Land Trust is addressing this by delivery of offsets through its restoration ecology projects.

The World Land Trust is, first and foremost, a conservation organisation set up to protect threatened natural habitats together with associated wildlife, and these restoration ecology projects work hand-in-hand with land purchase and protection, extending protected areas where land had previously been cleared. All WLT projects deliver offsets (measured as tonnes of CO2 sequestered) by restoring forest and preventing deforestation. WLT also works primarily in the tropics with emphasis on native species. Some 50% of a tree is carbon – the aim is to lock atmospheric carbon in the woody tissue and/or prevent what is stocked being released.

WLT prides itself on the quality of its projects, which must fit definite project design standards that ensure the offsets are real and attributable to a specific location where they are measurable, verifiable, protected and properly monitored. They must also deliver definite benefits for biodiversity conservation and the provision of environmental goods and services, both globally and locally. The projects are managed in collaboration with local non-governmental organisations with the participation of local communities, who are often involved in creating nurseries from native seeds, tree planting, wardening etc. WLT thus offers a ‘value-added’ offset with the full package delivered in the standard £15 offset price.

All WLT offsets are Voluntary Emissions Reductions (technically VERs). We deliver our offsets through:

• Reforestation – planting native trees on cleared land usually in buffer areas which join up or extend tracts of standing forest important for endangered species;
• Assisted natural regeneration – allowing regeneration by natural succession, usually by excluding grazing livestock and controlling fire. The process may be accelerated by enrichment planting to accelerate re-colonisation by high forest species;
• Rehabilitating degraded forest – again through protection, usually from grazing livestock and wood-cutting, to allow the forest to recover;
• Avoided deforestation – essentially protecting standing forest under imminent threat of clearance from being cut down, so preventing the release of its stocked carbon.

In practice, a combination of all four approaches is often used on a given land parcel. More information on these techniques, and their relationship to the Kyoto Protocol, is given in the project design pages. Progress on all the project sites is closely monitored, with regular updates on the WLT websites and in WLT News, published twice a year.

“WLT is raising money, not to save mankind with carbon-storing trees, but to save the wildlife that lives in them. The fact that mankind may also find salvation in the process is incidental. I found it a refreshing take on the question of carbon-offset, which can be surrounded by as much sanctimony as science.”
Taken from Telegraph article Reassembling Eden 8th December 2007.