March 2023

Carbon Sequestration on the Croft

Yesterday I took a walk up to the top of our hill and saw our neighbours had started an extensive tree planting scheme. Their deer fences went up last year and furrows have been made ready for planting.

We are still waiting for our management plan to be approved and are working on our woodland expansion plan. We are also planning a deer fence around the top perimeter of the croft to protect our temperate rainforest and young trees from deer browsing. (Although venison has been a large part of our diet this year and Alasdair’s self-taught butchery skills have been much appreciated.)

Deer fences aside, there are a surprising number of choices to be made with the woodland plan and Alasdair’s extensive knowledge as an ecological advisor for the Woodland Trust doesn’t always help. Sometimes you can know too much (!), and he is keen to be creative in a way the standard, funded, approach doesn’t always allow for.

We have the option of signing up for carbon credit schemes for tree planting. These schemes are designed to give a financial incentive to fund planting native trees by providing an income by carbon off-setting. Lots more trees will be planted because of these schemes which is of course a good thing. Some rich folk will also buy land just to make money this way, which will mean more tree planting but may also mean less access to land for local people to live and work. This is not such a good thing. For this reason, some argue that carbon credits shouldn’t just be about trees but about community, and about protecting existing landscapes like woods, grassland meadows, and peat bog which all sequester much more carbon than newly planted trees. We are hopeful there will eventually be a more holistic credit system that recognises all these areas of good land management.

The problem we have is that we don’t want to encourage anyone to produce more carbon.  I’ve spent months trying to get my head around the logic of carbon credits and net zero because the logic doesn’t work and almost certainly won’t fix the problem we are in as a planet.

We need to plant trees and reduce carbon emissions because even though trees sequester carbon, it isn’t permanent, not in the way that releasing carbon stored underground in oil and coal is. Trees release the carbon again when they die. If we view one as cancelling out the other there is no incentive to cut emissions. Planting trees will mitigate the problem but digging up the ground to plant trees also releases carbon (even if you use a spade!), which is one more reason looking after the trees we have must come first as must improving natural woodland regeneration.

That said, would refusing to sign up for carbon credits now be a bit like turning down a bitcoin payment would’ve been twenty years ago because a few dodgy people use it for cybercrime? Should we really look a gift horse in the mouth? If we have more finances in the future, we will be able to do more to look after the woodland we have on the croft. So for us, the jury is still out.