Carbon Offset FAQs

Q. What is the ecoU.com tree planting scheme about?

A. Carbon Offset is a very complex subject; we want to offer a simplistic opportunity to reduce your carbon footprint by planting trees in your honour. We believe in keeping it simple as after many years of research there is still no clear way forward. When you choose to plant a tree through ecoU.com you are not making a donation to a charity, you are acknowledging that your choice of CO2 emitting activity (e.g. Flying, Driving your car) is damaging the atmosphere and you are making an admirable effort to neutralise your impact.

Q. What happens when I order a Tree to be planted through ecoU.com?

A. When you order a Tree an automatically generated email is sent to you confirming your order. We also receive an email with your order details which we print out for record purposes. We transfer those details to a waterproof label which is then tagged on to the tree(s) of your choice in the nursery. When it comes to planting time (October - March), your tree is brought out to the mountainside in Wales to plant. Once planted the plastic label is replaced with a metal tag that is stamped with the unique reference number contained within the certificate that you receive from us. If you ever want to visit your tree it is important that you keep a record of this (TF.Ref no.). We then send you an email confirmation of planting with a map of the planting site showing where your tree is situated.
The tree then starts work absorbing CO2, purifying our air and releasing our much needed oxygen. It will carry on doing this day after day, month after month, year after year.

Q. Can we stop global warming?

A. There is no guaranteed way of stopping global warming. Some scientists think that we are already beyond the "tipping point" and that it is now too late to do anything to reverse the situation. At ecoU.com we consider this to be a counsel of despair and since we have got ourselves into this mess, we should all try and do our bit to help sort it out. Almost everything we do produces greenhouse gases so there are millions of ways for us all to reduce our respective carbon footprints. The felling of trees is not helping the build up of excess CO2 in our atmosphere so we desperately need to increase the amount of trees being planted.

Q. How can planting a tree stop Global Warming? After all it may take a hundred years for a tree to grow to maturity and fix any significant amount of CO2?

A. It is important to remember that our human timescales aren’t the best ones to use when making assessments about the future of our planet. As it takes time for trees to grow and absorb CO2 we have to be planting many more of them now to have any hope of balancing emissions and fixation in the future. The most important thing to understand about tree-planting is that you are not doing it for yourself but to help people in the future. A logic which says you shouldn't do something because its good effects will take time to manifest is a flawed logic. On the contrary – we should be busy now, trying to protect our future and our children’s children.

Q. The main problem with all these carbon-offset planting schemes is that they encourage people to think it is ok to fly because, since their ticket is "carbon-neutral", they're not doing any harm to the planet. This is true isn’t it?

A. Carbon-offset planting has probably been responsible for the establishment of more living trees than any other individual planting initiative in the history of the planet. To tree-planters like us, this achievement only commands respect and admiration. However, if an offset planting scheme promises carbon-neutrality it is actually promising something that it can't really deliver mainly because it will take a very long time before the putative carbon-neutrality is achieved and secondly because no one who is alive now is going to be around to check on the trees by the time they mature. Oaks, for example can live for a thousand years. It would be better to say – as we do – that flying is inherently destructive for the planet, that you should do as little of it as you possibly can and that if you are going to do it, you could do something that is ecologically positive at the same time. You should also understand that it’s going to take many, many decades for your tree to soak up the amount of CO2 that your
flight is producing.

Q. The trees are going to rot down eventually and then all the CO2 is going to be released back to the atmosphere. What’s the point?

A. Any CO2 absorbed by a tree and stored in its woody tissue as carbon is CO2 that isn’t contributing to global warming. An individual tree may therefore be regarded as a "carbon sink" while it is still alive. The question then becomes: what happens to the tree once it dies? Most of the species that we plant are grown for their use as timber - oak, ash, beech, cherry and sweet chestnut etc. When a tree is sawn up for timber the bulk of its carbon remains locked up for much longer. See last question below for more info on the long term plans for the trees.

Q. How will planting a tree help the environment?

A. Trees help the environment in so many ways it would take forever to list them all but here are some vital reasons...

A) Trees take carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and store it in their woody tissues – 50% of a tree’s dry weight is carbon. This process, called sequestration, is very slow initially but accelerates as the tree matures. Globally, forests currently absorb between 1/5 and 1/4 of all human emissions of CO2 .This is clearly a very important factor in the struggle to combat global warming as CO2 is the major greenhouse gas. Planting trees on its own will not solve the problem of global warming – but it does help.

B) Trees support a vast array of other plant and animal species. Up to 500 different kinds of animals may depend on one oak tree for their survival! Humans have been very adept at making other species extinct. Planting a tree helps to reduce this process.

C) Trees produce oxygen which is kind of useful. Try holding your breath for a few minutes and you'll realise why!

D) Trees work like giant green air-filters, constantly purifying our atmosphere, taking out particulate matter and other pollutants.

E) Trees are used by us for so many things we tend to take them for granted, from newspapers, magazines, doors, through cricket bats and baskets to tables and chairs. The list is endless. You can even run your car on wood alcohol produced from timber. The great thing about using materials drawn from trees is that, as long as you keep replacing them, you are using a renewable resource.

Q. How long will it take for my tree to grow to maturity?

A. The length of time that your tree will take to grow will depend
on which species you choose:.

Willow /Administration 50 years
Birch /Administration 40 years
Poplar /Administration 80 years
Beech /Administration 80 years
Oak /Administration 100 years
Ash /Administration 80 years
Cherry /Administration 80 years
Alder /Administration 70 years
Sweet chestnut /Administration 100 years

Trees are individuals, so the soil type and local climate will have a marked effect on growth. These figures are rough guides only.

Q: Will I be able to visit the forest?

A: Yes you will. Please go to ’the forests’ link at the bottom of this page for directions.

Q: When will my tree be planted?

A: We only plant deciduous trees - those that lose their leaves in winter, as they are better than conifers for promoting ecological diversity. It is only possible to plant these once they become dormant in the autumn. We will plant your tree between October and March and send you an e-mail certification of planting shortly afterwards.

Q. How much CO2 does a tree absorb over its life?

A. How much CO2 a tree will absorb over its life will depend on numerous factors including, amongst other things, its species; where it is grown; how it is looked after; and its individual genetic make-up. Trees, like us humans are carbon based life-forms and they use the suns energy to withdraw carbon from the air to use in myriad ways in their internal cell chemistry. They mostly take it in through small pores on the undersides of their leaves as gaseous CO2. While there are times, particularly at night, when trees give off more CO2 than they absorb, the net overall balance of CO2 flow is always into the tree rather than the other way around.
A piece of dried timber weighing 100 Kgs will contain /Administration 45 Kgs of carbon fixed from the atmosphere. Because trees use the suns energy to split CO2 into carbon and oxygen, it turns out that when you take the oxygen into account the tree is actually fixing an amount of CO2 that is more than its own dry weight! Chemists use the term CO2 (e) or equivalent to describe this. Without going into the atomic chemistry this means for our purposes that: 100Kgs of dried timber contain 45Kgs of carbon which is equivalent to 165Kgs of atmospheric CO2.
The precise amount that any tree will absorb will obviously depend on how much it weighs at maturity. Here in Wales, Beech trees for example, can grow up to a weight of 5 Tonnes or more. Since roughly 50% of a tree is water, a mature Beech will have fixed CO2 according to the following equation. 2.5 X 1.65 = 4.125 Tonnes of CO2. Smaller trees such as Birch and Willow will fix smaller quantities of CO2. We recommend that our customers select the larger species such as Beech, Ash and Oak if they are looking to ensure parity between the CO2 the tree will fix and the CO2 released in their flight. For illustration purposes and as a very rough guide, a return economy flight from London to New York and back will release approximately 1.5 tonnes of CO2. Source - ESA 21. National Science Foundation. (U.S.A.)

Q. Does it matter where I am Flying?

A. No. Because we all share the same atmosphere, the destructive effects of a flight and the beneficial effects of a tree being planted are the same irrespective of the where these happen.

Q. Some recent research indicates that planting trees in temperate latitudes doesn't help the climate. What is the response to this?

A. The valuable climatic modelling research by Ken Caldiera, Govindasamy Bala et al of the Carnegie Institute/ Lawrence Livermore Laboratories needs to be taken seriously by offset tree planters in northern latitudes but there are a number of reasons why this work will not accurately predict the temperature effects of the forest planting work that we do.

1. The model used appears to take no account of the emissive effects of alternate land uses. It posits the temperature effects of mature forest canopy vis-a-vis bare ground/pasture. To explain this: The land we are planting on was hitherto used as pasture for methane generating ruminant animals. Methane is more than 20 times more 'warming' than CO2 and the U.N. estimates that human agriculture is responsible for 18-19% of all anthropogenic ghg emissions. When we replace grazing pasture with trees we get the added benefit of a reduction in atmospheric methane concentrations. No account of this is taken in this research.

2. Global climatic modelling of this kind can help us to understand in outline terms, the complexities of the interactions between oceans, forests and the atmosphere. However it can never accurately predict the temperature effects of tree planting on a local or even regional level. To give an example. The land we are planting on is north facing. The reason for this is simple. North facing land in the northern hemisphere is generally cheaper than south facing land because it receives less solar insulation and is thus less productive agriculturally. For most of the winter, the sun doesn't even touch the land we work on! What this means is that the warming effect of a mature forest canopy, in terms of its reduced albedo (reflectivity) as envisaged by this model does not really apply.

3. The model uses a 'slab' or uniform representation of the earth’s oceans. i.e. The oceans are given a uniform temperature and there is no attempt to incorporate the complexities of the planets ocean circulation in the calculations. Obviously this is quite a gross simplification of what is one of the main drivers of global climate. Given that the earth is 70% water- covered and the deep-sea currents undeniably influence our climate on a massive scale, this appears to be an area of inevitable inaccuracy.

4. The model posits the temperature effects of mature, natural, forest canopy, covering entire areas of the planet. Now this is never going to happen. We need land for a myriad of other uses so forests can never cover all the surface, however much some of us may want this. There will be massive breaks in the cover that will allow 'albedo cooling'. Furthermore we are planting managed woodland and so can tailor our planting to minimise the envisaged warming effect of a close canopy. As mentioned above we can plant on north facing slopes. We can select species such as Ash that are inherently more reflective than say, Beech or Oak as they only retain their leaves for 5-6 months of the year and these leaves are in any case slender and shiny. Also we can manage the woodland to improve its albedo by leaving open spaces, planting the trees further apart and by ensuring a wide diversity of tree types. The result of this is that the trees will mature at different rates and thus be harvested at different times so ensuring that rather than having one complete area of mature canopy, we have a dynamic situation where individual trees are cut down and replaced as they mature. This means that the woodland will never represent the dense mature canopy that this model is based on.

5. The logical development of this research (however much the authors may cavil at this) is that, if serious about attacking global warming, we should consider cutting down trees in temperate and boreal zones. They can't have it both ways. Either trees are cooling in temperate regions or warming. If they are warming then they have to go! This to me is the most dangerous repercussion of this work. According to this research we now have to acknowledge the arrival the new climate criminals - British deciduous trees!

Q. What is the long term management plan for these Forests?

A. The forest management plan is informed by two guiding principles. Our primary objective is to facilitate the lock-up of carbon from atmospheric CO2 in the trees' timber for as long as possible. Our secondary aim is to encourage a high degree of biodiversity in (and community access to) the woodland.

If a tree grows in a forest, then dies, falls over and decomposes the carbon that it has absorbed over its lifetime will flow back quite quickly to the air. If this happens, there is no real, (long term) gain in terms of the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere. One of the most cogent and often repeated criticisms of offset treeplanting is that the carbon storage afforded by a tree is very temporary. It is said that carbon is effectively being transferred from the permanent sink provided by the underground hydrocarbon fossil fuel reserve (of coal and crude oil) into the atmosphere and then offset by 'temporary' storage in the woody tissues of the tree. This criticism is taken very seriously and the design of a long term forest management plan addresses the salient issues.
Firstly, through the creation of a charitable trust which holds ownership, in perpetuity, of the land on which the trees are planted. In this way we can reassure our customers that the forests that they are creating will be completely secure.
The governing document of the Trust states that:
" the purpose of this trust is to maintain and nurture the Forests in such a way as to (A) minimise flow back of carbon to the atmosphere as CO2 and (B) to encourage biodiversity and community access to these forests".

Currently we are looking at 2 main long term options for the timber that will be produced by the forests. (All the trees we grow are types that may ultimately be used for timber) The first option is to harvest the trees into construction timber at maturity, preserve in an eco-friendly way and then use for house building and other construction uses in the local community in the normal way. If hardwood timber is kept dry (i.e. in the roof of a house) it can last for many hundreds of years without relinquishing its carbon. The second option is to harvest the timber into large baulks and dump in the nearby sea. Although this may appear wasteful in terms of a useful resource it appears to be the best option with regard to reducing the flowback of carbon to the atmosphere as CO2. In the anaerobic conditions of the sea floor hardwood can last without decomposing for a very, very long time. The way to understand this is to consider how well preserved are the oak keel timbers that made up the Viking longships that sank in the North sea in the period A.D. 700 - 1100. Most of these ships sank more than 1000 years ago and in many cases are very well preserved. With both of the above options there will be residual material that is too small to use either for construction or for burying at sea. This material is known as brash to foresters and rather than let it lie on the forest floor and decompose it is envisaged that a better use for it would be as a fuel source to supplant fossil fuel use.
Once the trees have been cut down (/Administration100 years), the whole process of forest establishment can begin again on the same site. The term "Sequestration Farm" is used to describe this process by which one plot of land may be used again and again to withdraw CO2 from the atmosphere using the suns abundant energy. In a way what we are trying to do here, is to make a start re-creating the earth’s fossil reserves of stored solar energy and in doing so re-absorb all the carbon that we humans have all been so good at pumping into our atmosphere. Does this seem like a hopeless task to you? Well, we are going to need all our reserves of hopeless optimism to get on top of this problem.