More resources needed to grow the Carbon Code
THE voluntary Woodland Carbon Code (WCC) was a far-sighted move by the Scottish Government and the Forestry Commission when it was set up in 2011.
The initial idea, which still holds good today, was to produce a Carbon Code that would provide a consistent approach to evaluating how many ‘carbon units’ a particular woodland could be said to be sequestering.
The WCC also initiated and maintains to this day a set of rules that determine when a company buying WCC certified carbon offset units from a WCC approved woodland can actually report those units as offsetting its own carbon emissions in any particular year.
The point of this caveat is that if I’ve just planted up a 100-hectare woodland, you can’t claim that the units of carbon that my woodland will eventually sequestrate are good to offset your current carbon output this year. Obviously, those baby trees have hardly sequestrated anything at all yet.
The problem for the forestry sector, and for potential investors and corporates interested in buying carbon units, is that the team at Scottish Forestry that runs the Woodland Carbon Code (WCC) on behalf of the Forestry Commission, is just that, a small team. It is clearly going to need more resources and beefing up as time goes on and the market for the carbon units it certifies heats up.
Another problem, as Stuart Pearson, Business Development Director at Tilhill, the UKS leading forestry company, notes, is that currently the rules and tests applied can restrict which woodlands are eligible to be registered under the WCC.
The main concern is the financial viability test which states that the only woodlands that are eligible would be those which would not be economically viable without the additional revenues that could be derived from having WCC carbon units attached to them. If applied vigorously this could exclude productive schemes.
“Clearly, it makes no sense in the current climate, where companies are trying to get to net zero, to disadvantage commercially viable woodlands by excluding them from the WCC,” Pearson says. “We understand that the WCC is in the process of reviewing this restriction and there is talk of the WCC team getting additional resources.”
“We would really like to see this happen. The great thing about the WCC is that it provides woodland owners with a way of calculating the total carbon sequestration capability of their woodland over its complete life cycle, from planting to harvesting,” he comments.
The code takes into account factors such as ground preparation work, the types of trees included in the woodland, and the stocking density of the new plantings. Its calculations have a strong scientific basis to them and WCC carbon units have won a considerable degree of acceptance in the market.
“We would also like to see the WCC adapted to reflect the fact that the carbon sequestered by a conifer forest is not lost back into the atmosphere when the trees are harvested.
“Those trees are turned into wood-based building products and the carbon from them can be assumed to be sequestered for many decades thereafter. There is a huge body of work going on to map embedded carbon through the lifecycle of timber products,” he comments.