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The Carbon
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Station: Tree Planter

Question: If I plant a tree, will it help reduce the effect of Carbon emissions?

Sapling

Background:

  • Planting trees does seem an obvious way of helping to ‘offset’ your carbon emissions.
  • The following website is devoted to this cause:   Trees for life
    Read their claims carefully.
  • Unfortunately, many scientific groups disagree. 
    Read about this here: Carbon-info.org
  • On the BBC website, an article quotes Will Steffen of Sweden’s Royal Academy:
     "New forests are temporary reservoirs that can buy valuable time to reduce industrial emissions, not permanent offsets to these emissions."  Source
  • Additionally, planting trees to offset carbon could actually be counter productive is they are planted in the wrong place.

Your task:

  • If you feel that planting trees does help to offset your carbon emissions, use the ‘trees for life’ calculator  and find out how many trees you might plant.  In their scheme, you will need to make a donation, which you raise by an event.
  • If you feel that you would like to help in a more direct way, visit their @How can you help? page at  Trees for life
  •  The Woodland Trust
     

Discussion:

  • Clearly there is considerable disagreement about the ‘carbon offset’ philosophy.  What is your opinion and does anyone have the correct answer?
  • If you believe that ‘planting trees is important’, how will you convince others to follow your actions?
  • Some tree planting schemes are clearly wrong?  Can you think why this might be true?
     

Next station:

Now visit the ALTERNATIVE ENERGY STATION to see if you can modify your home to help.

 Alternative Energy