to cut emissions and save energy - but your
environmental impact still worries you?
more...
Are you a landowner, wondering what the
advantages of putting land under new
native forest might be?
more...
Actually, businesses respect the environment more than we like to give them credit for. People like Kwikfit,
Marks & Spencer, The Green Insurance Company and Stagecoach pay good money to cover bare British hills
with native woodland because trees aren't just about biodiversity and looking nice - they trap CO . Our clients'
carbon management plans contain both short and long term strategies that focus first and foremost on avoidance. And then they plant trees. Trees capture carbon slowly and naturally - with no collateral damage.
The UN inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change admits that nothing we do to slow global warming will show results before 2050. Efforts are being stepped up with schemes to cut emissions; save energy; harness the sun, wind and sea; fine polluters; protect rain forests; recycle; manage waste; use biomass boilers; write green laws; and so on. But the process is dogged by conflicts of ideas and interests and there's just no quick panacea.
Dire warnings from the recent Copenhagen Climate Conference (with sea levels rising twice as fast than previously predicted and the Amazonian rainforest shrinking by 75% from global warming alone) are this month echoed by the UK Climate Projections 2009 report which warns of growing floods and drought. This planet needs
all the help it can get. And - whatever else we do - all the permanent forests it can get, too.
As for companies who buy a whole woodland's worth of nature's air-cleaners that'll outlive the lot of us:
they're doing it because they respect the work of trees, because they can and because they care.
more...
EU latest on soil carbon
A recent EU report says the carbon sequestered by Europe’s forests and peat bogs plays a crucial role in climate change mitigation, with peat alone trapping the CO2 of 40 million cars.The report says protection and enhancement of forests and native ecosystems that act as carbon ‘sinks’ is vital.
We're Paving Paradise, putting up parking lots - and killing our baby birds. UK house sparrow numbers have shrunk by 68% in the last 30 years because we're uprooting bushes and trees for concrete parking slabs. No trees = no insects = no food for bird families.
Arnold Schwarzenegger and other US and foreign governors have signed up to a forestry offsets mechanism designed to preserve Indonesian tropical forests as part of US cap-and-trade schemes.
(above) At the opening in Cumbria of one of The Green Insurance Company's schemes where another 9 500 native trees were planted: the
award-winning TCIC's MD, Andrew McMillan and staff, and (R) Forest Carbon's James Hepburn Scott and Higham Hall Estate's Keith Fisher.
(right)
This isn't just any tree. This is an M & S tree - the first of the
40 000 new M & S trees, planted so far by theMarks & Spencer
Home Division.
It's just nice to know that whenever you see an M & S Home furniture delivery van going about its business there's a new mixed species woodland growing up in
Northumberland, all because
of those journeys.
Farmer Harry Connell at the Mears Group's scheme on Minsca Farm in Lockerbie.
(left) Harry Connell completes the planting of 9.5 hectares of native woodland for Mears Group at
Minsca Farm, Lockerbie, Dumfrieshire.
(above) Marks & Spencer's Terry Corsham and Steve Rowe with John Izzat of
College Valley Estate at the 2006 opening of their scheme in Northumberland.
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