Big Tech thinks it can plant trees better than anyone else

Some of the biggest names in technology are joining forces to try something many before them have failed to do: use trees to negate their greenhouse gas emissions. Google, Meta, Microsoft and Salesforce are creating the Symbiosis Coalition as an effort to support “nature-based” projects aimed at removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

It’s a tactic that companies have used for decades to try to offset their greenhouse gas emissions by planting trees, which absorb and store carbon dioxide through photosynthesis. The hope is that paying to restore forests will amplify this process, ostensibly neutralizing companies’ carbon footprint. It looks simple enough on paper. However, a growing body of evidence showed that it strategy fail time after time.

The Symbiosis Coalition seems to think it can change things. Together, the companies have committed to purchasing credits from “high-impact, science-based restoration projects” representing up to 20 million tons of captured carbon dioxide by 2030. They say they will scrutinize the projects for quality control, with the objective of increasing demand. for carbon credits that have gained a bad reputation because many carbon offset initiatives have failed in the past.

In a recent example, a study of 26 carbon offset projects in six countries published in the magazine Science last year found that few of them managed to stop deforestation. Whatever climate benefits the projects were supposed to have were exaggerated by up to 300 percent. A separation investigation one of the world’s leading carbon registries found that 90 percent of its tropical forest offsets turned out to be “ghost credits” that likely did not represent real reductions in greenhouse gas emissions. And a 2022 report The non-profit organization Carbon Market Watch determined that carbon offset credits offered by major European airlines were similarly linked to faulty forestry projects.

A big part of the problem is that it’s difficult to measure how much carbon dioxide a tree or forest has absorbed, which has led to projects exaggerating how good they are for the climate. Planting trees is also a complicated task – if they don’t live for hundreds of years, they will end up releasing all the carbon they have stored. Planting the wrong trees in the wrong place, creating forest farms instead of forests, can also harm the local environment. In 2020, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff Supported a plan by the World Economic Forum to plant a billion trees – although the research underpinning the effort was quickly criticized by dozens of scientists for grossly overestimating potential environmental benefits.

However, Salesforce, Google, Meta and Microsoft are confident they can prevent history from repeating itself. To try to achieve this, they worked together with independent experts to establish strict rules criterion for forestry projects. Symbiosis also says in a Press release which will “engage and compensate indigenous peoples and local communities” to work towards “equitable outcomes”. And although it’s starting with forestry projects, Symbiosis says that over time it will incorporate other strategies, such as sequestering carbon dioxide. in the ground.

“Nature-based projects are complex and challenging to get right and have not always lived up to their intended impact,” Symbiosis Executive Director Julia Strong said in an email to On the edge. “Symbiosis aims to address the challenges around the integrity of nature-based projects to date by setting a high-quality standard that is based on best-in-class industry standards and the latest science, data and best practices.”

The coalition is modeled after a similar initiative called Frontier, launched by Stripe, Alphabet, Meta, Shopify and McKinsey in 2022. Frontier is focused on supporting new technologies to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Frontier has contracted for more than 510,000 tons of carbon removal – but has only delivered about 1,700 tons of captured carbon so far.

Both Symbiosis and Frontier aim to facilitate agreements between carbon removal projects and companies that want to pay for their services. Eventually, Symbiosis hopes more companies beyond its founders will participate.

For perspective, all of these efforts still represent a small fraction of the emissions these companies produce. The 20 million metric tons of nature-based carbon dioxide removal that Symbiosis has committed to is only slightly more than the 15.4 million metric tons of carbon dioxide that Microsoft alone produced in its country. last fiscal year.

It is true that safeguarding the world’s forests does a lot of good for the planet. But exploiting them in the name of fighting climate change has not been a safe bet. Raising the Stakes, Big Tech’s Greenhouse Gas Emissions are growing with the emergence of energy-intensive AI tools. If companies are serious about combating climate change, they will still have to control the amount of pollution they produce. Even successful forestry projects can’t do all the dirty work for them.