Low Impact

Greenfleet is an organisation we’ve mentioned before – they’re a non-profit organisation who have been around for over 10 years and provide an offset service where they will offset your carbon emissions through tree-planting. The idea is that as the trees grow, they take carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and sequester it in their trunk and roots. Initially this was targeted at offsetting people’s emissions from the family car, but has since expanded to include any household emissions.

Their recent accomplishment is to receive accreditation as a “Greenhouse Friendly” Abatement Provider. The “Greenhouse Friendly” Abatement Provider accreditation program is one set up by the Australian Federal Government to provide some measure of regulation and auditing over the business of producing offsets for carbon emissions.

By providing specific rules and guidelines as to what constitutes a carbon offset through tree-planting, for instance, it gives the consumer some confidence that the money they pay will make a difference.

A key concept is one of “additionality” – in the case of tree planting, a Greenhouse Friendly Abatement Provider has to show that the tree planting wouldn’t have occurred without someone paying for the offset. This prevents, for example, an unscrupulous orchard grower from selling carbon offsets. The grower was always going to plant that orchard and by selling you an offset, you are just subsidising the orchard without making a difference to your emissions. On the other hand, if a farmer would more normally plant grain in a paddock, but allows a permanent forest to be planted in that paddock thanks to carbon offset payments, that does make a difference. Trees were planted where they otherwise wouldn’t have been, and can proceed to sequester CO2 from the atmosphere.

Another element of the Greenhouse Friendly Abatement Provider program is to ensure the permanence of the tree planting. A provider must ensure that the trees survive for a period of at least 70 years. If not, the provider must legally commit to planting more trees to replace them, or source carbon offsets from another provider to make up for it. This prevents a provider reselling and reselling the offsets associated with one paddock worth of trees in the case of fire or drought.

Greenfleet have always seemed like a good-hearted organisation. Their ten year history and not-for-profit status is evidence of that. But this accreditation gives consumers even more confidence that offsets purchased through Greenfleet are making a difference to their overall impact on the environment.

Its important, though, that offsets don’t become “the easy way out”. A very real concern is that we hold off from making changes to our lifestyle to reduce our greenhouse emissions because we can buy our way out with offsets. A far better approach is to emit less in the first place – hopefully sites like Low Impact have a tip or two that can help you accomplish that! But as you work towards emitting less carbon into the environment, offsets from an accredited source can be one way to help reduce your impact.

Categories: environment, environmental, green, offsets

Tags: abatement, emissions, greenfleet, greenhouse friendly, offsets, trees