farmerm
Member
- Location
- Shropshire
If a landowner has any savvy about him he will perhaps be wise not to touch such lease schemes. I fundamentally dispute the notion that it is possible to offset emissions with a 25 year lease when it takes millions, or hundreds of millions of years for carbon to be taken back out of the active carbon cycle and returned to be locked away in fossil carbon reserves. We take fossil fuels buried deep under ground, we burn it and we add 10bn tonnes of previously inactive carbon to the active carbon cycle each year. For reference 10bn tonnes of carbon is by my rather rough calculation is equivalent to the carbon held in 1 million ha of forrest..... Tell me, how does a 25 year lease have the slighted impact on how much carbon is in the active carbon cycle? Such schemes may transfer wealth between emitters, consumers, land owners and carbon traders and it may help ease the conscious of the emitters. So yes a business opportunity perhaps for sponsored wildflower meadows, water meadows and other measures to maintain and improve biodiversity but it the stated aims of such schemes refer to offsetting carbon emissions then they would be both a fraudulent and mis-selling. Such schemes of durations less than a million years can fundamentally not offset carbon emissions in any meaningful way!!Depends on if the landowner is savvy enough to "rent" it on a 25 year lease to a company to offset their emissions as per the "Environment Bank" model. The farmer (if he is the landowner) can then manage it. You need to think wider than tree planting, there will be financial value in all kinds of important conservation habitats such as wildflower meadows, water meadows etc etc