Governments and businesses hoping to plant trees and restore forests to reach net-zero emissions must sharply limit such efforts to avoid driving up food prices in the developing world, the charity Oxfam has said.
Planting trees has been mooted as one of the key ways of tackling the climate crisis, but the amount of land needed for such forests would be vast, and planting even a fraction of the area needed to offset global greenhouse gas emissions would encroach on the land needed for crops to feed a growing population, according to a report entitled “Tightening the net: Net zero climate targets implications for land and food equity.”
At least 1.6 billion hectares — an area five times the size of India, equivalent to all the land farmed on Earth — would be required to reach net zero for the planet by 2050 via tree-planting alone.
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While no one is suggesting planting trees to that extent, the report’s authors said it gave an idea of the scale of planting required, and how limited offsetting should be if food price rises are to be avoided.
Nafkote Dabi, climate policy lead at Oxfam and coauthor of the report, said: “It is difficult to tell how much land would be required, as governments have not been transparent about how they plan to meet their net-zero commitments. But many countries and companies are talking about afforestation and reforestation, and the first question is: Where is this land going to come from?”
Food prices could rise by 80 percent by 2050, according to some estimates, if offsetting emissions through forestry is overused. About 350 million hectares of land — an area roughly the size of India — could be used for offsetting without disrupting agriculture around the world, but taken together, the plans for offsetting from countries and companies around the world could soon exceed this.
“Already, hundreds of millions of people around the world are going hungry. We need to consult countries on how they are going to use their land,” Dabi said.
The report also found that two of the most commonly used offsetting measures, reforestation and the planting of new forests, were among the worst at putting food security at risk.
Far better, according to the analysis, were nature-based solutions that focused on forest management, agroforestry — the practice of combining crop cultivation or pasture with growing trees — as well as pasture management and soil management in croplands. These would allow people to use the land for food while sequestering carbon.
“We are not against afforestation and reforestation, and we do not want to stop people doing these things. But they should not be used at a large scale and should be combined with other methods such as agroforestry,” Dabi said.
She gave the example of Switzerland, which is planning to offset about 12.5 percent of its emissions through carbon credits from projects in other countries, including Peru and Ghana. To reach that target would take an area the size of Costa Rica, Oxfam estimated.
Danny Sriskandarajah, chief executive of Oxfam GB, called for companies and governments to cut their emissions drastically rather than relying on offsets.
“Too many companies and governments are hiding behind the smokescreen of ‘net zero’ to continue dirty, business-as-usual activities. A prime example of the doublethink we are seeing is the oil and gas sector trying to justify its ongoing extraction of fossil fuels by promising unrealistic carbon removal schemes that require ludicrous amounts of land,” he said.
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