What is SinksWatch?

SinksWatch tracks and scrutinises carbon sequestration projects, highlighting their threats to forests, ecosystems, forest peoples and the climate. SinksWatch focuses on tree plantations, particularly in areas where land tenure and land use rights are in dispute.

SinksWatch believes that forests are a safeguard against the impacts of extreme weather events caused by climate change and that they therefore must not be used to justify the continued, additional and permanent release of carbon from fossil fuel burning.

Why focus on offsets?

Carbon sinks under the Kyoto Protocol and other mechanisms are used to allow the continued and permanent release of carbon from fossil fuels. Exchanging permanent release in exchange for temporary storage in trees increases the amount of carbon in the active carbon pool, pressing need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to future generations.

It is important that people understand that it is not possible to reverse the flow of fossil fuel carbon back into the permanent carbon pool in the time scale relevant for climate change discussions. The underlying assumption of offsetting schemes that ‘carbon is carbon’ ignores the different interactions of these carbon pools with the atmosphere – a crucial difference

Why focus on plantations?

In addition to the underlying flaws of carbon sink credits, the Kyoto Protocol also gives the wrong incentives: The focus is on carbon sequestration, not carbon reservoirs: the faster a tree grows the more credits can be gained. This leads to an incentive for large-scale tree plantations. Examples of this perverse incentive are already evident. The negative environmental and social impacts of large-scale tree plantations are well documented. Large-scale industrial tree plantations often generate poverty, increase inequity, affect food security, deplete water and soil resources, drastically reduce biological diversity, to mention but the most obvious impacts. They are also extremely prone to fires and insect outbreaks, further destabilising an already insecure carbon store.

Planting trees for the purpose of carbon credits and carbon accounting in the Kyoto Protocol will not address the root causes of the global forest crisis. It also is not an effective way to tackle the pressing problem of climate change. On the contrary, carbon sink credits run the risk of exacerbating both the global forest crisis and climate change.