Carbon trading and off setting
Carbon trading systems and carbon offsets
Carbon offsets are a way to reduce the impact of activities that we can’t avoid. The principle is
that you work out how much carbon emissions you need or want to counteract, and then support
projects that remove carbon emissions from the atmosphere. These projects can include tree
planting, methane flares, renewable energy research and development, or manufacturing process
and technology improvements.
Carbon trading systems allow businesses and nations to offset their own emissions by supporting
projects in other places. The more a project reduces carbon emissions, the more carbon credits
it gets. The trading systems allow carbon credits to be bought and sold as part of a company’s
greenhouse accounting. This means that a company or nation that’s not able to meet its own
reduction targets directly can buy carbon credits from outside projects to bring their own totals
down. Trading in this fashion also means increases in the funding available to implement good
changes in poorer countries.
Australian companies cannot join the international carbon trading market until Australia ratifies the
Kyoto Protocol.
Offset programs can take several forms – anything that will either remove carbon emissions from
the air or reduce how much we are putting in. Tree planting programs calculate the number of trees
it will take to absorb the amount of carbon you are making as they grow. Methane flares burn waste
methane to avoid it being released into the atmosphere. Methane is twenty three times as powerful
a greenhouse gas as carbon dioxide, so burning it to transform it into carbon dioxide decreases
the amount of global warming due to those emissions. Some offset projects invest in changing
manufacturing processes to make them more efficient and less resource-hungry, such as improving
a paper mill’s system to use more recycled paper. Cogeneration projects use waste energy from
manufacturing processes to generate power for the manufacturing plants, meaning a reduction in
fossil-fueled power consumption.
Tree planting
Tree planting is the simplest and most familiar form of carbon offset. Trees breathe in carbon
dioxide, split it into carbon and oxygen, absorb the carbon into their wood and leaves, then breathe
oxygen back out. So tree planting directly removes carbon emissions back out of the air rather than
reducing how much we put in. Every tree we plant contributes to a climate solution.
However, calculating exactly how much carbon is absorbed back into the growing wood is complex.
Planting a new forest can create carbon emissions from soil disturbance and machinery use. The
amount of carbon sequestered by a forest varies with rainfall, climate and latitude. And then there’s
timing: forests act as carbon sinks while they’re actively growing, but mature forests balance growth
and decay to become carbon neutral.
The Australian Greenhouse Office oversees this calculation process for offset programmes. To be
officially counted, plantings must be at least 200 square metres in size, and at least 10 m wide
so they can be detected from the air. The trees planted must have a potential height of at least
2 metres and a crown cover of at least 20%, so that they will create enough wood and leaves to
absorb a clearly measurable amount of carbon each year. The offset programmes then use an AGOdeveloped calculation toolbox to only report the carbon sequestered in their forests and plantings
during that year.
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Ethical investments
There are two kinds of green investments – those that invest in companies that aren’t
doing anything bad, and those that invest in companies that are actively developing green
technologies and products.
Sustainable resource investment certification lets you compare different “green” funds to see
which ones invest the way you would like.
The Australian SAMS Sustainability Index (AuSSI) provides stock performance information on
the top sustainability-driven companies across Australian industry.
n The Ethical Investment Association
http://www.eia.org.au/
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