Ecosystem Services
What are ecosystem services? Yet another piece of early 21st century jargon or a useful description of something we all understand but did not have the words for until recently? In plain speech ecosystem services can be defined as the benefits that people obtain from natural ecosystems and these benefits include the very obvious, such as food, water, soil, and the less obvious, such as waste decomposition, biodiversity, flood regulation, biomass accumulation and of course that most topical of ecosystem services carbon sequestration.
For those who wish to delve more deeply into this topic more can be found here.
BFT have of course been offering carbon sequestration services for the last ten years, with carbon sales from a variety of our sites including Drygrange Community Woodland and Carrifran Wildwood to companies such as The Carbon Neutral Company, amongst others. The money earned from selling carbon credits is effectively gap funding. This means funding that we would not otherwise have and which ensures the establishment of our trees. In carbon speak this is called additionality. If there is no additionality, then there is no basis for a carbon project.
BFT offers a complete tailor made service to companies in the area of ecosystems servicing and we work closely with the company in question to discover what their objectives are and how best we might help them to realise their goals. No two projects will be the same. There are many different ways that we work with there companies from setting up projects such as with EICC to offer carbon sequestration, volunteering and training opportunities, conservation work, community activities and corporate sponsorship.
Over the last twelve months we have been working closely with a number of Scottish based companies to develop, refine and package our woodland based carbon sequestration offering. The Edinburgh International Conference Centre (EICC) aspires to be at the forefront of green business practices. Green Project Team Leader Reynaldo Guino-o and Head of Marketing Sandy Pearson of EICC approached BFT in 2006 to see if we could work with them to develop a project to allow their conference clients the opportunity to offset the carbon emissions associated with their events held at EICC. This is seen as an important part of their product offering and creates a distinct marketing advantage for their sales team when pitching to conference organisers across the globe.
As part of the EICC's Plan-It Green programme they encourage conference clients to feed data (numbers of people, where they travelled from, how much eating and drinking they will do) on a future event to be held at EICC into a carbon calculator which produces an estimate of the conference carbon emissions.
To find out more about the EICC's Plan It Green Project click here.
The calculator was constructed by 'ecometrics' experts (best not to ask) Catriona Webster and Gary Davis at the Edinburgh Centre for Carbon Management and is licensed to BFT to use specifically for this purpose. It is then up to the conference organisers to decide what volume of their unavoidable emissions they wish to offset.
It should be stressed that every effort is made to educate conference organisers and delegates to consider the least polluting form of transport and that the option of carbon offsetting should be made only after considering all other options. We do not want to encourage the use of carbon offsetting as a get out of jail free clause rather it is an option after considering the three Rs: Reduce, Reuse, Recycle. More on ECCM click here.
Jill Spink of EICC Marketing Department and Plan-it Green programme commented "We are delighted to be working with BFT on this new project and are really looking forward to hearing the response of our clients. We developed this project because of a demand from the industry to operate within sustainable and green parameters. BFT's work has allowed us to offer that to them."
BFT are also working with GMP Print Solutions, another forward thinking company based in Edinburgh, who have a Borders connection through Malcolm Spiers of Burnside Print and Design in Selkirk. Roger Parry, the Director of GMP is keen to work with BFT through community woodland groups in the region to offset unavoidable carbon dioxide emissions and we hope to have a tie up between the Leadburn Community Woodland group and GMP in the near future.More on GMP Print Solutions click here.
Another company considering working with BFT to offset unavoidable CO2 emissions is a Fife based paper company who have been through the Edinburgh Centre for Carbon Management 'econometrics' process to evaluate their emissions liabilities and are now discussing with the Trust the most appropriate scale of offsetting for their requirements
