The Oakland Institute has released a new report about the impact of Green Resources’ plantations in Uganda on local communities: “Evicted for Carbon Credits: Norway, Sweden and Finland displace Ugandan farmers for carbon traders”. The report is the Oakland Institute’s third about Green Resources, exposing the destructive impact the company’s plantations have had on local…
Tag: Natural Climate Solutions
Unfortunately, the age of offsets is not over. The aviation industry is planning to fry the planet with offsets
In April 2019, George Monbiot said, “I believe the age of offsets is over – I don’t think it should ever have begun – because it’s now clear that we have to decarbonise our economies pretty comprehensively across all sectors.” He’s written the same thing a couple more times recently.
Planting trees and restoring forests is not going to stop climate breakdown. “We need a rapid end to fossil energy use precisely because we want to preserve the world’s existing forests”
By now you will have seen the headlines. The image above is just a small selection. They are based on a paper published in Science titled, “The global tree restoration potential”. While the paper generated wildly optimistic headlines, it also generated a fair bit of criticism.
Offsetting fossil fuel emissions with tree planting and ‘natural climate solutions’: science, magical thinking, or pure PR?
By Chris Lang (REDD-Monitor) and Simon Counsell (Rainforest Foundation UK) Unlike carbon capture and storage systems, trees do actually take carbon out of the atmosphere and store it – temporarily, at least. In theory, planting enough new trees, and allowing existing forests to grow and regenerate, could mop up some of the excess CO2 now…
Guest Post: Nature-based solutions. Separating the wheat from the chaff
Recently, British journalist George Monbiot launched a Natural Climate Solutions campaign. In the spirit of encouraging debate about the dangers of offsetting emissions from fossil fuels against the carbon temporarily stored in ecosystems, I wrote a post asking the question, “Is the new Natural Climate Solutions campaign a distraction from the need to leave fossil…