Greenwashing and the Problem With Trees

Trees have forever been associated with environmentalism.

Their natural ability to take carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere during photosynthesis is a process even elementary school students are taught.

It follows that planting trees is at the forefront of climate action plans, worldwide;

The elegance and simplicity of a natural carbon removal system are immensely attractive characteristics to governments and corporates.

However, this view of forestation is starting to face criticism as corporate and state greenwashing and over-reliance on trees as a climate action strategy has been found to be increasingly problematic.

While critical for various reasons, tree planting cannot be treated as a substitute for emissions-cutting or engineered carbon removal solutions, in the following article, we’ll be exploring the key criticisms of forestation initiatives.

The green dollar

In the mid-1980s, Chevron ran commercials to convince the public of its positive environmental impact. Titled People Do, the campaign showed Chevron employees protecting bears, butterflies, sea turtles and all manner animals.

And so began the use of “greenwashing”, coined by environmentalist Jay Westerveld, to describe outrageous corporate environmental claims.

To this day, corporates love talking about how green they are.

Ultimately, what we’re seeing is more resources being allocated for marketing products and services as green rather than adapting infrastructure to ensure sustainable business models.

The inadequacy of offsetting

Since their introduction during the Kyoto Protocol, offsets have been touted as an effective way of neutralizing one’s carbon emissions. Forestation projects feature heavily in the offsetting industry, and many companies have publically declared their commitments to donate to plant trees on a per-product/service-purchase basis.

Nonetheless, it would be misguided to believe that these carbon offset programmes instantly made our consumption carbon neutral. Yet, such thinking encourages us to continue emitting carbon when we urgently need to reduce emissions.

Tree planting is also not a sure carbon removal technique — given the varying species, climate conditions, fertilizer/nutrients, water, and other factors, we would be looking at ten years plus to actually ‘offset’ the share of emissions from our present-day activities, which are purportedly being ‘neutralized’ by these companies.

Adding up all of these green initiatives, which attempt to justify business-as-usual with tree planting, and assuming that tree planting won’t have any tangible effect for several decades, this starts to be a massive problem we currently face.

Scalability

Inability to measure impact

Unfortunately, because of the nature of trees, there are inherent and potentially insurmountable challenges in accurately assessing how much additional carbon dioxide we’re removing through forestation efforts.

The continued reliance on these types of carbon removal initiatives also causes significant issues for introducing tradeable carbon markets. Such markets require transparent, verifiable, and measurable carbon removal systems — as highlighted, attaining these across the industry will be difficult without the exclusion of forestation in carbon markets.

Permanence

Trees are not a permanent solution; they need to be thought of as “hiding the carbon for a while”, according to Abigail Swann, an ecology professor at the University of Washington. Given that carbon dioxide stays in the atmosphere for about 100 years, forest offsets only work if trees remain intact for a century.

When trees and plants die, whether from fires or logging, or simply falling, most of the carbon trapped in their trunks, branches, and leaves returns to the atmosphere.

Dangerous distractions

There has also been an increase in governments showcasing carbon offsetting commitments while completely undermining these efforts with other activities.

Worryingly, there has been an increase in the occurrence of such behaviour amongst corporations and states around the world.

We should meet tree-planting initiatives with scepticism.

While tree planting should not be discouraged — we should be planting them as much as possibly — climate action plans that rely too heavily on tree planting are dangerously misguided. Time and time again we have seen that attempts to orchestrate mass-scale tree-planting to reduce atmospheric climate have failed to achieve this goal, not only because the capacity to plant and grow trees at such a scale is limited but also because of our inability adequately measure the impact of these types of initiatives.

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About Mantle

Mantle is an investment platform streamlining capital into green technology. Through Mantle, green tech startups can efficiently raise capital from impact investors around the world.

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