We buy, lease and plant trees for carbon credits which we supply to large energy companies and oil companies who need the credits to meet their legal obligations.
Climate change is a phrase we use to describe changing climate patterns that:
The effects of global warming and climate change are already measurable. New Zealand’s climate is changing, largely because of the build-up in the earth’s atmosphere of greenhouse gases particularly carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide.
The ETS is a carbon market that all New Zealanders will be affected by. The ETS will account for all Kyoto emissions and reductions within New Zealand. Those who absorb greenhouse gasses will be paid by those who emit greenhouse gasses. Each sector will be brought into the ETS in a staged manner, with forestry first and agriculture and waste last.
All major sectors of the economy have obligations under the New Zealand emissions trading scheme. This includes the following sectors: forestry, stationary energy (power generation), industrial processes, transport (liquid fossil fuels used on land, sea and in the air), synthetic gases, waste and agriculture. Sector participants will be required to surrender one emissions unit for each tonne of greenhouse gas emissions they are responsible for under the scheme. Some sectors receive an allocation of emission units.
Households and small businesses are not required to participate in the emissions trading scheme but may experience indirect price increases in the cost of electricity and fuel when the stationary energy and transport sectors enter the scheme. The government will provide some financial assistance to households and has created a Household Fund to reduce non-transport household emissions through the promotion of energy efficiency and renewable technologies in households.
Every sector and every greenhouse gas in New Zealand. Everyone in New Zealand who uses electricity or fuel for a car will notice increased costs.
The right to pollute the atmosphere is becoming increasingly regulated internationally hence the carbon market has been developed to provide an equitable way for industry to offset their greenhouse emissions. Basically emission units (carbon credits) are traded for the right to emit co2 into the atmosphere.
A carbon credit represents one metric tonne of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. When a business or organisation purchases a carbon credit, they are offsetting their own carbon emissions by funding a project that will sequester (‘absorb’) or reduce a metric tonne of carbon emissions elsewhere.
Carbon credits are claimed annually by filing an application with the New Zealand Government.
Carbon storage is simply the storage of organic matter in soil and trees that reduces the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.
Carbon dioxide is believed to be the primary greenhouse gas that is contributing to climate change. Photosynthesis is the natural process that trees and plants use to grow. This process uses carbon dioxide from the atmosphere together with sunlight in a chemical reaction to produce oxygen and glucose. It is because of photosynthesis that growing trees can help reduce the emission of greenhouse gases to the atmosphere. Carbon Sequestration is the term used to describe this process of absorbing and storing carbon.
It is not feasible to directly measure the amount of carbon that a forest is storing over time, so the preferred approach is to use tree-growth modelling to estimate the amount of carbon stored. This modelling is then adjusted on a regular basis to reflect the occurrence of events that affect the rate of carbon sequestration, such as rainfall or bushfire. Many different models for carbon sequestration are available.
If you take a typical pine tree trunk, half of it is carbon (cellulose, lignin etc). Let’s assume that the tree trunk is 2 cubic metres, therefore 1 cubic meter is carbon. It took 3.67 tonnes of carbon dioxide to make that one tonne of carbon.