West coast fires destroy carbon offset forests
Tree projects helping companies such as BP and Microsoft reach climate targets are hit by blazes
WILDFIRES raging across the US west coast are burning forests used by governments and global corporations to offset their carbon emissions in a double blow to tackling climate change.
The US is on track for a record-breaking wildfire season, with 100 large blazes burning in 14 states.
One of the largest is the Bootleg Fire in southern Oregon, which has destroyed more than 400,000 acres since it began in early July. Alarmingly, the flames are thought to have spread through at least a fifth of the forests that had been set aside for carbon offsets in the region, including a sizable portion of Microsoft’s carbon removal portfolio for the year.
Carbon offset projects run by the state of California and a forestry project in Washington used by BP are also ablaze. The programmes are a popular option for corporations with ambitious climate targets as they allow companies to reduce their carbon footprint by counterbalancing their emissions against the investments in carbon-reducing projects.
Companies can purchase “credits” from qualifying projects, with each credit equating to a ton of carbon that has been removed from the atmosphere. But the extreme weather conditions causing increasingly ferocious wildfires have raised questions about the long-term viability of the schemes.
The nation’s largest current blaze – the Dixie Fire – reached around 432,800 acres in size as it spread across northern California on Friday.
It has left at least eight area residents unaccounted for, a local sheriff said yesterday.
Greenville, a Gold Rush-era town in the Sierra Nevada, lost 100 homes and much of its century-old downtown.
Chris Carlton, supervisor for Plumas National Forest, said the region was witnessing “truly frightening fire behaviour”. The fires have destroyed communities and set the stage for a calamitous fire season for the western US, following record heatwaves and droughts.
Microsoft, a long-time buyer of the carbon offset market, said some of its purchases were among those “now burning”.
“That is a reality of the new world,” Elizabeth Willmott, Microsoft’s carbon programme lead, told a webinar hosted by Carbon180, a climate-focused NGO.
Ms Willmott said the wildfires were prompting a “deep conversation” at the company, but she cautioned against a “knee-jerk reaction” to the situation.
Earlier this year, the software giant announced the purchase of credits for 250,000 tons of carbon from forestry company Green Diamond in southern Oregon, where the Bootleg Fire is now raging. Patti Case, of Green Diamond, said it was not yet clear how much of their land had been destroyed.
She stressed that, like every carbon offset programme, the projects carry “buffer” credits to account for shortfalls from wildfires, drought or disease.
Ms Case said that while the carbon offset system still faced “more adjustments”, it was “still sound” logic to focus on improved forest management and carbon offsets in general.
Wildfires have also burned through the Colville Indian Reservation in Washington state, where BP purchased more than 13million carbon offset credits valued at more than $100 million (£72million) in 2016.
BP said the scheme included a buffer that was “sufficient to replace offsets associated with natural disasters similar to the fire affecting Colville”.
Critics of the largely privately-regulated offset market have said the recent wildfires should serve as a wake-up call.
“These forests are supposed to protect carbon for at least 100 years. And we can already see that the sort of permanence part of that claim is not looking very strong at all,” said Danny Cullenward from CarbonPlan, a nonprofit group that tracks offset markets.
“The last fire season was off the charts, and the background climate conditions this year have been worse and we’re still very early in the season.
“We are on track for another very, very bad year. And that’s just not what these [carbon offset] protocols were set up to address,” he said.