đł Climate Relief Doesn't Grow on Trees
Under the guise of a trillion-tree promise, climate action struggles with ignorance toward the environmentâs ecological and colonial complexities.
Nowadays, trees have become the inoffensive, accessible panacea for our environment's ills. Theyâre green, pristine, and look good for public figures on your TV screen. Trees themselves donât rely on carbon capture technologies in their infancy nor do they spark politicised conflict. That is, unless they become agents of diversion from unchanged business practices that continue to harm the planet.Â
Net Zero 2050 is now Australiaâs subject of salvationâa roadmap to carbon neutrality and environmental restoration. In order to meet these targets, large corporations, governments, and landowners partner with planting not-for-profit organisations that do the work then report the numbers.
The intention is to restore ecosystems that stand for centuries. Biodiversity can be brought back through planting diverse species of trees, plants, and shrubs native to the landscape. When wet spells blow seeds across the land and billions of seeds sprout up, abundant tufts of trees and vegetation with the highest rates of diversity and survival will attract animals to stay.
âIf you have enough living biomass, they self-strengthen, and at a certain point, they self-replicate,â says Maximo Bottaro, co-founder and CEO of Reforest Now. âItâs called ecosystem resilience.â
Planting Like Columns on a Spreadsheet
The problem lies in scientifically impotent initiatives that simplify complex organisms to a numbers game, which does no good long-term. Some ecologists and reforestation NFPs warn against cheap, reductionist strategies that instrumentalise trees as âcarbon-fixingâ devices, taking the pressure away from the root of the industrial problem. Not so obviously, conservation in one area doesnât justify degradation in another.Â
âIf you plant the wrong trees in the wrong spot, you plant trees where they should never have existed,â says Annabel OâNeill, General Manager at Greenfleet, a regular partner of UNSW. âThey're not going to survive. It's about ensuring that ecosystems are going to be adaptable to changing climates.â
If trees are planted like columns on a spreadsheet with no heed to soil decomposition and respiration that contribute equal if not greater amounts of carbon dioxide emissions, then the repair is undone. A utilitarian perspective on forests, which ignores their interaction with other organisms and cycles, can be a highly destructive mindset. For instance, eucalyptus trees sequester 40x less carbon than the average tree, but theyâre vital for endangered koalas and our native soil.
While itâs true that there are several genuine institutions that work with revegetation teams to ensure ecological viability long before the first seeds are planted, Reforest Nowâs Bottaro could not confidently claim this being commonplace.Â
âIf your whole model is about planting pine trees at $1 with a shovel and two patches on your hips, then you're going to expect quite a lot of the trees to die. Alternatively, the local endangered species enthusiast will want to do everything absolutely perfectly, and then thatâs $15 a tree and nobody wants to work with you now except a local millionaire or two. Your next option is these programs in poor countries where projects are thrown to someone else who can do the work as cheaply as possible or never even get planted.â
Maintaining Integrity in CooperationÂ
âEven the more nuanced and genuinely effective efforts at improving livelihoods and improving ecological integrity are often still informed by very biassed principles,â says Susanne Vetter, South African ecologist.
The land in Australia is tricky, not only in its dry lands subject to extreme droughts, but also in its historical roots, having been pillaged from Indigenous people. While Traditional Custodians of the country have direct management of more than a third of the land, they donât have much political and financial influence over its ownership and restoration.Â
âThe people whose livelihoods are most intertwined with the land are the ones that tend to have the least political power and influence, so the laws tend to neglect them.â
Vetter stresses this experience is universal. Like science, the laws have their own European colonial legacies. In Western Australia, two recent cases where Indigenous land owners shut down tree-planting events have been a serious bone of contention. One follows the Whadjuk Aboriginal Corporationâs ongoing dispute with the WA government over funding. The other protested the planting eventâs purpose to honour the late Queen Elizabeth II.Â
Both follow the revised Aboriginal Cultural Heritage Actâs implementation in WA, which imposes harsher penalties for damaging sites of traditional significance. While Indigenous reconciliation has slowly become a pillar of legislation and a reason for consultation with Elders, it has yet to keep up with centuries of exploitation. There is truth to this for all other Australian states.
âOver the last 100-150 years, people have been removed from Country predominantly to government missions,â says Greenfleetâs OâNeill. âMany of the Kabi Kabi community still live there. It's very difficult for young people to come back and work on Country because Noosa is a very expensive place to live.â
Encouragingly, efforts have been dedicated to community integration with ambitions of all-encompassing ecosystem resilience. Greenfleet and Noosa & District Landcare have created traineeships to provide paid employment and upskilling for Kabi Kabi people.
The problem also extends to these biodiversitiesâ limited protection. A carbon project in Australia is customarily valued for 25 years but is no longer legally protected after. It would be a zero-sum game for climate targets if whole forests were chopped down thereafter and the carbon was lost. Indigenous land use agreements in Australia are also primarily signed with mining companies, OâNeill observes after discussing the atypical 100-year agreements Greenfleet signs to restore vegetation.
Harsher Truths
âMost of the carbon dioxide thatâs causing the greenhouse effect comes from burning fossil fuels,â says Vetter. âThose took 400 million years of tree growth under high atmospheric CO2 and certain climates to fossilise, while it took 200 years of the Industrial Revolution to burn them.â
Consumers and government regulators are no strangers to observing green credentials more compelled by market share than genuine concern. In 2022, the ACCC found that 57% of 247 businesses it reviewed were guilty of greenwashing. This is concerning, given the time we donât have. Experts simply warn that while carbon capture technology is expensive and experimental, reforestation efforts are nonetheless tremendously effective, and thereâs no better time than now to act.Â
âHowever much money you have, whatever position you have in the world, the world economy is not immortal to the effects of nature. Itâll only take a handful of natural disasters to see recessions and collapses. All this paperwork and money that we think is so important, will have no value.â
"This is concerning, given the time we donât have. Experts simply warn that while carbon capture technology is expensive and experimental, reforestation efforts are nonetheless tremendously effective, and thereâs no better time than now to act."
Carbon capture sounds like a good idea but is WAYYY too costly be implemented effectively at scale and simply not worth it at this current time if we want to reach net zero targets. The Greenwashing is real!