Consumers who drank “zero carbon” Garage Project beer or Otis Oat Milk might have thought their beverage was saving the planet, but there’s evidence the exact benefits are questionable.
The companies are two of many purchasing a type of carbon offset earned when a forest owner promises not to cut down their trees.
Protecting forests is a valuable exercise. But based on government information, Stuff found one New Zealand scheme selling the offsets may have overestimated the effect of logging if it wasn’t protecting the forest.
The offsets are of a type called ‘avoided deforestation’ – which means landowners who could make money from felling trees (releasing carbon) instead sell offsets.
Although protecting trees is undoubtedly good, this kind of product has been under scrutiny internationally because it’s tough to determine who had genuine plans to fell forest, and how many trees would have been lost without the cash.
Credits bought by Garage Project in 2019 and Otis came from a Southland-based project, run by environmental company Ekos – which asked the owner of a regenerating forest to stop harvesting trees in exchange for carbon credits.
Although the law prohibits clear-felling native forest, landowners are allowed to selectively harvest species such as beech and rimu.
The offset revenue helps the Southland forest owners to pay for pest control and develops local employment.
In project documents, Ekos claimed that without its offsets, Southland’s Rarakau forest would have essentially stopped growing. The company states commercial logging “arrest[s] the process of natural succession”.
However, information from the Ministry for Primary Industries – which oversees and does field audits on harvested forests, including Rarakau before logging stopped – challenges that claim.
Only a limited amount of timber can be taken, a ministry official told Stuff. Each year, a regenerating forest should produce more wood than is allowed to be removed, meaning that even selectively harvested forests should continue to grow and suck in carbon.
The normal behaviour of harvested forest matters, because carbon offsets should only be issued for the difference they are making.
KEVIN STENT/Stuff
Owners with beech forest are allowed, by