Greenwash: Carbon offset trees are not just for Christmas

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A couple of weeks ago I got an email from a PR company suggesting I “forget Christmas trees this year” and instead give as a present a “personalised tree” to be planted by schoolchildren in the Scottish highlands “to reduce carbon emissions”.

It sounded good. The bit of the highlands involved is the Alladale estate, which millionaire owner Paul Lister wants to turn back into true ancient landscape, with wolves and elk as well as trees.

The man behind gathering the cash for treeplanting is former city director Geremy Thomas. After a bruising legal battle with an old company of his, PNC Telecom, he has taken up country pursuits. His new company, Carbon Managers, sells advice to companies on how to cut their carbon footprint with offset projects like tree planting. And, since April, has also been offering to arrange the planting, for companies as well as for Christmas.

A string of firms – 27 at last count, including airconditioning company Vent-Axia - have paid to plant 25,000 trees this year so far. Both at Alladale and “in the West Country”, which turns out to be Thomas’s family farm outside Bath in Somerset.

Most of the companies that have joined the scheme use the tree planting in promotion – “communicating their new green credentials” as Carbon Managers puts it. Many promise customers that they will plant trees in return for business. Some give their customers a certificate from Carbon Managers listing the carbon offset achieved.

It was a small joy to find on the website of the print and design company Andara, a “tree planting” certificate awarded by Carbon Managers to one of Andara’s customers - oil giant BP, one of the world’s biggest producers of carbon-emitting products and a former subject of this column. It reported that among 100 trees planted for Andara at Alladale on 15 September 2008, the company had “allotted one tree to BP to offset carbon emissions of 0.75 tons per tree”.

It’s nice to know BP is doing its bit for the climate, after all. If you want to check out the tree, there is even a GPS grid reference.

So what’s wrong with all this? Well for one thing, Carbon Managers makes some fairly big claims for the carbon-catching power of its trees, which stand at around one ton per tree, depending on which bit of literature you are reading.

Compare this with another recent treeplanting carbon offset project in Scotland. Stagecoach says it is operating “Scotland’s first carbon-neutral bus route,” from Fife to Edinburgh, after offsetting five years of emissions with 140,000 trees that will eventually soak up more than 20,000 tons of CO2. So that project requires not one - but almost seven trees - to soak up a ton of CO2.

Carbon Managers, which claims to “cut through the scientific fog around global warming and the role trees play in controlling climate change”, could not give me a source for its own claim. (Nor incidentally could it tell me either how many decades the trees will take to soak up the CO2, or how long they are expected to live before they gave back their carbon back to the air.)

I don’t know who is right with their figures. But Stagecoach can claim its project is organised by the charity Global Trees, and accredited by Forest Carbon using a carbon calculator for individual tree species developed at Edinburgh University. Whereas Carbon Managers could provide me with no evidence that their planting is accredited or verified by anyone.

This is not really good enough. There are rules, regulations and accreditation systems for the booming “voluntary” carbon offset market, precisely because we need to have some confidence that they can deliver what they promise in return for our money. This is not just lucrative green PR.

When I asked Thomas about all this, he said: “We do not offer tree planting as an approved carbon offset.” He could have fooled me, what with the certificates and the website claims.

He said that while, on average, his trees can “fix up to a tonne of CO2 … we never claim that a specific tree will generate x amount of carbon savings”. But that, unless my eyes deceive me, is precisely what the BP certificate does claim. Not on average, but for one tree.

His email continued: “We do not push tree planting as a carbon offset scheme … this is just an added bonus to the widely excepted [sic] advantages of planting them.” Well yes, planting trees is good. But in fact, offsetting is the only benefit mentioned on the certificates I have seen.

And there seem to be no guarantees about the future of the trees. I expect the Alladale trees will be looked after. Hopefully they will help remake the ancient Caledonian forest. But should Carbon Managers’ clients have to take it on trust that the Thomas family won’t take a chainsaw to the trees on its farm and resume arable farming anytime in the next century or so?

The truth is the company makes repeated claims about how its treeplanting operations offset carbon emissions, even if it makes contradictory claims about how much. And, so far as I can establish, it does so without using any of the offset industry’s usual standards and verification systems.

Companies need to dispel any suspicion that they may be rogue carbon traders. Thomas insists that he has now decided to invest his own money in an area that he “is extremely passionate about”. Maybe so. But many people, me included, are more suspicious about carbon offsets these days. Passion is not enough.

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