It is not so good to plant trees, if there are carbon credits.

Planting trees in general is a positive thing, you plant a small tree in your garden and the result is a shade that improves the climate of your house, especially if you live in cities and warm places, the green of its foliage brightens your eyes and has a positive psychological impact and also serves as a refuge for insects, birds and mammals.

In cities, they help mitigate the heat island effect that occurs when the sun heats large surfaces of asphalt and concrete, causing urban areas to have a much warmer climate than the surrounding area. In short, trees are our friends, but the The role of trees in forests goes much further.

Adult trees with their deep roots reach underground water and transpire it through their leaves, taking it to the atmosphere in the form of water vapor. It is surprising, in fact, forests make clouds that will later fall in the form of rain, but also They trap carbon from the atmosphere and fix it in the form of cellulose and that is the reason why they are seen as a solution to the climate crisis.

If we plant enough trees, one trillion according to the 2019 study, you would solve most of the climate crisis. When the study was published, its optimism generated at least three international tree-planting campaigns, but now 5 years later one of the co-authors of the study He retracted it, first accepting that the estimates he had shown in the study were too optimistic and published another study with more conservative figures. In fact, later studies had already questioned the magnitude of the reduction of CO2 in the atmosphere that his original study argued. , but the main reason why the author of this study recanted at the United Nations climate conference in Dubai is blood carbon.

Blood charcoal is a problem that has become more serious as a result of so many reforestation campaigns. Blood charcoal is the climate equivalent of blood diamonds, which are called that because they are extracted by dispossessing people of their land and exploiting extremely poor people in places where they were cursed with diamonds like Congo, Botswana and South Africa, blood coal is something similar and exists thanks to Carbon credits.

A Carbon credit is proof produced by a company, organization or environmental project that an activity was carried out that in some way reduced carbon emissions into the atmosphere. They are produced by companies that develop technologies for renewable energy and also by campaigns. of reforestation that help sequester CO2 from the atmosphere in the form of trees, these Carbon credits have a monetary value and can be purchased by companies and governments to reduce their environmental impact and their total CO2 emissions, in a few words if I am a company that produces a lot of CO2 into the atmosphere and I have no intention of reducing my emissions, I buy Carbon credits from an environmental project that will give me good publicity and make me seem genuinely concerned about the environment when in reality I don't give a damn.

This solution is obviously not ideal, the ideal is for each company to reduce its own emissions, but the carbon credit model at least helps its net emissions to be lower, that is in theory, the bad thing is that in practice It is very different, since a report by the non-governmental organization survivalinternational.org highlights the practices of one of the environmental projects that sell carbon credits to companies like Netflix and Facebook, it is assumed that they generate carbon credits by modifying the practices. grazing of some communities in Kenya, because it helps the recovery of vegetation that would potentially absorb CO2 from the atmosphere.

The bad thing is that no one asked these communities for consent and a practice was imposed on them that was different from the one they had been carrying out since ancient times, all of this without empirical proof that their old form of grazing damaged the surrounding vegetation.

This is horrible on many levels, basically for companies like Facebook and Netflix to give themselves good publicity and clean up their image, you go to a poor place, without any type of “education”, isolated from the rest of the world, without knowing what is happening and despite that they have the most harmonious lifestyle with the environment and produce the least amount of CO2 emissions, you decide that they are the ones who have to change their lifestyle and be more ecological, and in the process you deprive them of their land and their livelihood, this is not right and the proliferation of reforestation campaigns only amplified this problem.

That is why one of the co-authors of the study named Thomas W. Crowther now says that it is not necessary to plant a billion trees, that it is more important to restore and conserve existing forests.

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