Carbon offset

15.4 A few recommendable carbon offset programs

• The Trillion Tree Campain
The Trillion Tree Campaign started out as the Billion Tree Campaign, but once they managed to plant over a billion trees they decided to continue. They changed their name into the Trillion Tree Campaign and now aim to plant over a trillion trees all over the world. If they succeed and maintain all of them alive, these trees will be able to absorb about 160 billion tons of CO2 from the air. This roughly equals 4 years of human contamination! A study from Science Magazin agrees that planting a trillion trees might even prevent climate change if they will all get the chance to grow.

• Spekboom reforestation
In South Africa, they hope to reduce climate change by replanting spekboom in the desert. In her 2014 thesis, Sara-Jane Paviour writes: “Because of spekboom’s remarkable growth rate, its rate of carbon capture can rival that of tropical forests”. The spekboom doesn’t need to be cultivated in a nursery before planting, which takes time and money. The result is that one ton of CO2 can be captured for less than a tenth of the cost of sinking the equivalent carbon by planting trees in temperate or tropical forests. To plant spekboom, all you need to do is to take a cutting from an older plant, place this where you’d like to plant it (sandy soil is best), and give it water.

A study in Research Gate suggests that one hectare of spekboom reforestation could absorb 15.4 tons of CO2 a year. This while typical sequestration rates for afforestation and reforestation, are: 0.8 to 2.4 ton of carbon per hectare per year in boreal forests, 0.7 to 7.5 ton in temperate regions, and 3.2 to 10 ton in the tropics according to the Food and Agriculture Organization from the United Nations.

• Muvuca
Planting trees is a very popular way to ‘fight climate change’ but it often isn’t the most effective way. As mentioned earlier, the main problems are the time and energy needed for nursing the young trees before and after planting them. Another problem is that it is very difficult to re-create the same biodiversity as nature does. A new project led by Conservation International aims to restore nature on 70.000 acres of now pasture land in the Brazilian Amazon Rainforest. They plan to plant around 73 million trees in six years. Those trees will not be planted in a conventional way. Developed in Brazil only a few years ago, their new planting technique is called Muvuca. “In Portuguese, it means a lot of people in a very small place.” The Muvuca strategy requires that seeds from more than 200 native forest species are spread over every square meter of burnt and mismanaged land. The seeds are purchased from the Xingu Seed Network, which since 2007 has acted as a native seed supply for more than 30 organizations. This thanks to the help of more than 400 seed collectors–many of whom are indigenous women and local youths.

Of course, even in nitrogen- and phosphorus-rich soil, only some of these seeds will survive–but that bit of natural selection is key to the Muvuca magic. Several seeds germinate, compete between themselves for nutrients and sunlight, and then the strongest ultimately become big trees. According to a 2014 study by the Food and Agriculture Organization and Biodiversity International, more than 90% of native tree species planted with this strategy germinate, and they’re especially resilient, able to survive drought conditions for up to six months without irrigation. On top of these positive numbers for the environment, the Muvuca strategy provides new job opportunities for the local communities. Although the Muvuca reforestation method is very promising, any human-led reforestation still requires high maintenance to survive the first years. This is expensive and not always possible.

• Natural Regeneration
Luckily, recent studies now show that there’s an even better and cheaper solution. Some of those studies you can read for yourself in The UN Environment; Natural Climate Solutions; George Monbiot; Aljazeera and the Conservation.org. Natural regeneration is the method that helps nature run its course. It is a real, science-based strategy known as assisted natural regeneration. It is low-tech, high-yield, highly scalable, and up to 70 percent cheaper than planting new saplings! The premise of assisted natural regeneration is that the most economical way to restore and protect forests is to acknowledge nature’s resilience, remove barriers to natural regeneration and where necessary accelerate it. Given time, trees regrow and forests come back. Assisted natural regeneration simply supports and accelerates the process.

What does it look like in practice? Examples include stopping fires from burning young trees that are naturally regrowing, dispersing seed mixes in degraded areas close to intact forests, and developing national policies that incentivize intensifying agriculture in some areas in order to let others naturally regenerate. Eco Lodges that buy large areas of damaged nature can also help with allowing this nature to recover and wildlife to return. Even the 10 hectares of abandoned farmland that the Izhcayluma Eco Lodge turned into a garden, has already seen an increase of returning wildlife including many different bird species, squirrels, snakes, rabbits, bats, and even deer.

If natural regeneration is such an obvious and effective tactic, why has it not caught on yet? First, it does not have the same PR appeal as a person lowering a young sapling into the ground. Second, until recently, assisted natural regeneration was not seen as a solution that could work on a large scale. But advances in our ability to model and predict natural processes and an unlikely and unexpected test case in Brazil showed otherwise. Brazil’s Atlantic Forest stretches across 34 million hectares (84 million acres) of the country’s coastal southeast. As large as it is, it is a fraction of what it used to be, having lost nearly three-quarters of its original extent to deforestation. Over the past two decades, rural populations thinned, with people in farming communities abandoning their land to move to cities to find work. Well-organized local groups then ensured enforcement of a Brazilian law aimed at curbing deforestation. What happened next was remarkable: Between 1996 and 2015, nearly three million hectares (7.4 million acres) of the area was found to have regenerated naturally without a single sapling being planted!

• The advantages of algae
From the first plants that started the carbon circle of life on earth, algae might now be able to prevent our climate to change too drastically. Trees and algae sequester carbon dioxide naturally. Trees “consume” it as part of their photosynthesis process by “absorbing” carbon into their trunks and roots and releasing oxygen back into the air. Algae’s replicates the same process but “absorbs” the carbon in the form of more algae. Algae can consume more CO2 than trees because they can cover more surface area, grow faster, and be easier controlled. Hypergiant Industries even claims that their bioreactors can be 400% more effective at capturing carbon from the air than trees taking up the same footprint! Bioreactors can contain large amounts of algae and optimize for its growth (and related carbon sequestration) cycle in a way that is easier than trees. The overgrowth of algae is dehydrated and ultimately used as fuel or biomass.

Algae or seaweed can also be used as food. Seaweed absorbs minerals from the sea, making it a concentrated source of trace elements needed for human nutrition. A typical serving of dried kombu seaweed contains significantly more calcium than a cup of milk, according to the European Food Information Council. Seaweed is rich in iron, magnesium, potassium, zinc, and vitamin K and contains useful amounts of vitamin E, riboflavin, thiamine, niacin, and folate. Additionally, seaweed is high in soluble fiber and naturally low-fat. All of these characteristics make it an ideal food source that even reduces more CO2 than it produces. And as if the benefits of algae mentioned before aren’t enough, the scientists from the Technical University of Munich (TUM) have now developed a process that, according to initial calculations, can facilitate economically removing CO2 from the atmosphere. During this process, algae convert CO2 from the atmosphere into algae oil. In a subsequent step, this oil is then used to produce valuable carbon fibers. These carbon fibers can be deployed to produce lightweight and high-strength materials. Carbon fibers from algae are no different from conventional fibers and can therefore be used in all existing construction processes. Thanks to their strength, they save on cement, and granite reinforced with carbon fiber can even be used to produce beams that have the same load-bearing capacity as steel but are as lightweight as aluminum. At the end of their life cycle, these carbon fibers can be stockpiled in empty coal seams, permanently removing the associated CO2 equivalents from the atmosphere back to where it came from. “When you make plastics from carbon dioxide, it is quickly returned to the atmosphere through waste incineration plants following a few years of use,” says Kuse. “With the final safe storage, we remove the carbon dioxide from the atmosphere for millennia.

An interesting and complete new type of Carbon Offset Scheme is centered around protecting whales!

No matter how good the carbon extraction options are, in the end, it is still better to prevent having to remove this carbon from the air in the first place.