Carbon Sink Plantations
These are tree plantations, often eucalyptus but it can also be acacia, pine or oil palm, where the owner claims that the trees provide the so-called “environmental service” of carbon absorption. However, this is a false solution to the climate crisis. Carbon sink plantation projects increase carbon emissions. Although the carbon dioxide molecules stored in a tree might be chemically identical to the CO2 molecules emitted by a polluter in the North that ‘buys’ this stored CO2 as carbon credits, from a climate point of view the two CO2s are radically different. The carbon from the atmosphere stored in a tree is sooner or later released again when the tree is felled. Yet the polluting company in the North, by burning fossil fuels, throws a ´new´ quantity of Carbon into the atmosphere, increasing the total amount of carbon that is being exchanged all the time between the atmosphere and biosphere.