Can't see the forests for the gloom
More than 1000 environmentally-concerned drivers in Sydney have their conscience in the hands of Barry Roberts.
At first glance Roberts, a feedlot manager for the Japanese-owned Hannan Foods Group at Wagga, seems an unlikely bedfellow for a city greenie of any hue.
He speaks from under the veranda of his Akubra and has the gait of a man who looks as though he could wrestle a cow or two before breakfast.
But he admits to being vulnerable to a "rush of blood to the head" when it comes to planting trees, which is why he convinced his company's owners to establish one of the state's first and largest carbon-offset forests.
Since 2002 Greenfleet has planted about 23,000 trees at the Hannan feedlot property and nearly 3 million nationally. Greenfleet is a not-for-profit organisation, whose goal is to grow enough trees to consume the carbon dioxide produced by its subscribers.
These subscribers calculate the carbon dioxide emitted by their cars, flights and domestic power consumption and then donate to Greenfleet to establish forests of trees and shrubs on their behalf. An important condition is that, in order for it to be counted as a carbon offset, every species needs to be one that can potentially grow to two metres.
Greenfleet is one of the biggest offset outfits in Australia, with 11,000 subscribers, both individuals and fleet, but since climate change coverage has taken off, so has recruitment to the scheme. All carbon-offset companies are now preparing for the extra scrutiny that is likely to follow as they come in from the fringe to the mainstream.
Planting 17 trees for $40 for the average Greenfleet subscriber may sound simple, but the challenges facing the organisation are a formidable combination of human nature and mother nature.
One of the main problems Greenfleet has to rectify is its lack of detailed environmental accounting and auditing. A second forester has been employed to audit the plantings and to monitor future work. Extra staff will also enable more regular inspections of progress.
It has been a year since Greenfleet sent a staff member to Wagga to check on the progress of its carbon-offset forests there, leaving the organisation dependent on reports from locals.
Last week, accompanied by the Herald, Greenfleet forester Mick Spiller toured four properties where trees had been planted.
"It's priority No.1 for us to be doing what we are saying we are doing," Spiller says. As we arrive at the 690-hectare Hannan feedlot property, Spiller says he is expecting the worst, because of the drought.
But Roberts is justifiably proud of how the bigger of his two Greenfleet sites has progressed. Before the work, the 20-hectare hillside was denuded of vegetation and suffered from erosion.
He politely told Spiller that in the first year as many as 40 per cent of the trees and shrubs needed to be replaced because they had died, most likely, he said, because they were poor stock. Spiller suggested the losses might also be due to the drought.
The replacements and the survivors, however, have thrived and in spite of the harshest conditions on record many have grown to more than three metres. There is no doubt the site is well on the way to becoming a forest again - large numbers of birds are back, erosion has slowed and salinity has eased because the trees are lowering the property's water table.
On a three-hectare site - a different hill on the same property - the success of the planting has not been so great. There are still big bald patches where trees and shrubs have died. Spiller says his organisation will monitor the area and if sufficient trees did not get through in coming years, more will be planted. Generally, Greenfleet expects average losses of 20 per cent and allows for this when the trees go in the ground.
Because of concerns about the long-term fate of trees on private property, Greenfleet plans to turn increasingly to plantings on public land, where tenure is more secure.
One such example is the research centre of the Department of Natural Resources on the outskirts of Wagga. Dr Greg Summerell helps monitor revegetation at the site. In 2002, 14,320 trees went into the ground there. The bulk of the young forest has done well, given the drought.
Summerell suspects the dry conditions have meant fewer pests are attacking the trees and shrubs. In one small area where trees had been planted by children, however, the survival rate was lower and those that had survived were in poorer condition than those planted nearby by contractors.
"There does seem to be a big difference depending on who plants them," says Summerell.
This year when severe frosts struck, killing surrounding cleared pastures, grass under the Greenfleet trees survived and provided emergency fodder for starving sheep.
"This spot has gone from a major saline site to a rehabilitated arable area," Summerell says.
The drought may mean fewer insect pests but, for most landholders, it is as hard on environmental projects as it is on stock and crops.
On Christmas Day 1984, Rick and Pamela Martin's 940-hectare property, Burnbank, was razed by a bushfire, killing thousands of sheep and leaving the family with a property almost devoid of vegetation. Since then the Martins have revegetated many long, healthy corridors with as many as 60,000 trees and shrubs. Greenfleet planted 5000 trees on the flank of a hill at Burnbank in 2003. Before we inspect the site Rick Martin warns that because of the drought and some escaped sheep, the planting has not gone as well as it should have.
"Of all the trees we have planted the Greenfleet trees have had the toughest time," Martin says. "We are starting to hit the brick wall. The dams are dry, the paddocks have run out of feed and all of this at a time when livestock are worthless."
Conditions are so harsh it is staggering that he cares about the Greenfleet trees at all. His paddocks are down to a five o'clock shadow of yellow stubble, giving even a visitor a knot of despair. The surviving trees have done pretty well, considering the brutal climate in which they were expected to grow. But there is no denying that as many as 50 per cent of the plants are gone.
"It's pretty disappointing," Spiller says. A big worry for him is if the trees all die in one spot. As long as the survivors are spaced throughout the planted area, full regeneration is still possible in the long term.
"We are going to have to monitor this site - if I had found out about it earlier we definitely would have done some replanting," he says.
How does Greenfleet reconcile such large tree losses with its promise to plant 17 trees for $40? Spiller explains that the older a forest gets, the less the carbon accounting is about numbers of individual trees. As the trees mature it is about how many tonnes of carbon are locked within the wood.
"People are paying for us to sequester 4.3 tonnes of carbon for them every year. In layman's terms that equates to 17 trees a year. At the end of the day, as long as we are providing the carbon sequestration we have promised, then the plantings have worked."
While Greenfleet plants 17 trees and, in the establishment stages, replaces them when they die, not all trees will survive in the long term, as that is not the way a healthy forest functions. In a natural forest big trees out-compete their neighbours and there is simply not room for every tree to survive.
"We know that the older the trees get the less of them there will be because they will self-thin," Spiller says.
The flipside of this is that as soon as a Greenfleet tree reaches maturity it will cast seed for decades.
The other fundamental truth of a carbon offset is that there is no immediate fix for an individual's carbon emissions.
"People think it's going to be an instant result but it's not," Spiller says. "There's no way we can measure the carbon sequestered until the trees are mature. That is counting chickens before they hatch."
The reality is that the 4.3 tonnes a driver emits each year will not be sequestered in a tree for many years, perhaps decades.
Bumping across the 220-hectare property Mooney Valley in the tray of a six-wheeled buggy, called a gator, is what a drive over Mars must feel like. There is no ground cover at all; the property is a dust storm waiting for a wind. In spite of the horrendous dry, grazier Tom Smith seems strangely happy. He, too, warns Spiller that the Greenfleet trees have suffered in recent months. As we approach the fenced area of plantings, four sheep, grazing around the young trees, run off. A large number of individual trees and shrubs within the planting are dead.
"A grass fire went through here in January," Smith explains.
It's still not as bad as Spiller had feared. Many of the plants that looked dead may re-sprout after it rains, he says.
We then take the gator to a seven-hectare site, where 7000 young trees were planted in a single morning in August. Miraculously, even without a fraction of the rain that they would normally get and months of above average temperatures, almost all of the young plants looked to be alive. We cross another paddock and Smith gets excited.
"There's a phenomenon that you have to see," he says with a wicked grin. We drive through an empty dam and beside a three-year-old stand of several thousand Greenfleet trees. They are growing well.
The gator stops and Smith points a gnarly finger at a black wattle, whose wrist-thick trunk has deformed into the shape of a number seven.
It is probably one of the unhealthiest saplings we have seen all day and yet Spiller is delighted. Later he tells me why the "seven" sapling made him so happy. "It means he's [Smith] going up and down and keeping an eye on them, even noticing the way an individual is growing."
Everyone is aware that a carbon offset tree is different to a normal tree. There is a sense of responsibility because other people have outlaid money in good faith.
Roberts says he feels a connection between Greenfleet plantings and an exhaust pipe in Sydney.
"There's a third party that has a stake in those trees and when you say you are going to do something you should bloody well do it."