Atonement, doing a good thing to offset a bad one, is a tradition from time immemorial. Kings and aristocrats used to build cathedrals to atone for their sins. My equivalent is breakfast in bed for my wife when I fail to wake up at Tunbridge Wells station after an evening in London and end up somewhere due south on the Hastings line.
In the latest variation on the theme, businesses and other organisations can atone for their environmental sins by buying so-called carbon credits, with the money used to pay for environmentally beneficial schemes that in some way mitigate carbon emissions. Every credit you buy effectively allows you to emit a specified volume of CO2. They’re particularly favoured by transport companies, especially airlines, but recently a UK school declared itself to be the first in the country to go “carbon neutral”, a feat it achieved by reducing some CO2 emissions and offsetting the remainder with carbon credits.
Whether you approve of what’s becoming a multi-million dollar international trade – and some green groups slam carbon credits as a licence to pollute – the scheme is clearly here to stay. And that has important implications for the international timber sector.
A large share of carbon credit-funded environmental programmes are forest management and tree planting schemes. This could benefit the timber trade, resulting in more trees and a rising wood harvest. But the risk is that carbon credit-backed forestry reinforces public perceptions that the only value of a forest is as an environmental resource sucking up greenhouse gas. Once more the message could be “planting and preserving trees is good, cutting them down bad”.
However, the carbon credit system is still in its infancy, so the timber industry has the opportunity to turn it firmly in its favour. This means persuading governments, carbon credit scheme administrators and the public that the best forestry schemes to invest in are those that have timber production as a key part of the mix. That creates a commercial incentive to preserve and manage woodlands effectively, ensuring that they’ll help us atone for our environmental sins for generations to come.
