Giant firewhich has been dubbed the Park Fire, has now burned a total of 160,000 hectares. It is already one of the largest forest fires in the state's history. The fire has also burned areas of the forest that were supposed to remain untouched by logging because they were selling carbon credits for them.
As reported by “Financial Times“, the fire destroyed over 18 thousand hectares of forest (which is the area of ​​the Magura National Park) covered by the carbon dioxide absorption program coal. Forests were to remain undisturbed for 100 years to absorb and store carbon from the air.
This is the second such incident this year. In other states, several thousand hectares of forests have burned, which were part of carbon offsetting programs.
Forests and carbon credits
Forests and trees absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, which helps us fight climate change. Because some of the CO2 is absorbed by plants, less of our emissions stay in the atmosphere and warm the Earth.
This mechanism is used in the so-called compensation (more commonly known by its English name offset) carbon dioxide emissions. Most often, it involves an organization planting trees or declaring that it will leave an existing forest untouched, which can be converted into tons of carbon dioxide that the forest will absorb. The client – most often a company – pays for this and deducts these emissions from its own. Example: if a company's activities cause a million tons of CO2 emissions into the atmosphere, and the company buys an offset for half a million tons, it can claim that it has reduced its emissions by half. Some companies even boast that they are “climate neutral” because they compensate for all of their emissions.
So much for the theory. In practice such compensation often turns out to be nonsense and it only happens on paper. Fire in California is yet another proof that paying for emission compensation by planting or protecting forests is no substitute for real emission reduction. Because these forests can – as in this case – burn down. Especially since Climate change is fueling fires in various parts of the worldThe more the Earth warms, the more often favorable conditions appear, such as drought, high temperature or strong wind.
Eco-friendly
According to the Financial Times, customers for carbon credits, which were supposed to be proof of lower emissions, included oil companies: Chevron, Shell, BP. Offsetting emissions allows these companies to claim that they are doing something for the climate, even if they do not reduce their emissions at all. However, the absorption of CO2 by trees as a form of carbon credit has long been a source of great concern.
Such programs can (but theoretically shouldn’t) include forests that weren’t supposed to be cut down, or planting trees where they would have been planted anyway. Then there’s no added value. Second, storing carbon in plants is necessarily temporary. Burning gas or oil releases carbon (in the form of CO2) into the atmosphere that has been underground for millions of years. A tree can live for 100 years or more, but not thousands. So it’s not a long-term solution (that’s not to say that trees aren’t important in combating climate change, but their potential is limited).
Finally, even if a carbon credit actually saves a forest that was supposed to be cut down, nothing guarantees that it will not be affected by a natural disaster. This is exactly what can be seen in the forests in California for which carbon credits were sold. To protect themselves, companies buying carbon credits from the California CO2 compensation program pay additionally for “buffer” forests (constituting 10-20 percent of the purchased credit). These are supposed to “replace” the purchased forests in the event of a fire or other disaster. However, as the Financial Times reports, more than the buffer assumed for 100 years of the program has already burned in fires.
According to a journalistic investigation from last year, in which one of the organizations selling offsets was put under the microscope, as many as 94 percent. credits carbon had no positive impact on the climate. That is why their use by companies is often criticized as greenwashing.
An effective method of combating climate change is to actually reduce emissions where they come from – for example, replacing coal-fired power plants with renewable energy sources, choosing public and electric transport instead of cars combustion engines or limiting meat consumption.