Forestry Investment Blog

The multinational company Nestle Waters France has announced its new green intentions to offset its emissions from its factories by buying up trees in a rainforest.

This isn’t the first time a large international company has made this sort of announcement and I doubt it will be the last. By now the public has become sceptical about such declarations and until proven otherwise, tend to treat such intensions with indifference. After all a lot of multinationals go about cleaning up their image by showing off their green ‘credentials’ but critics say that their approach is inefficient at best and corrupt at worst.

However, Nestle Waters France realise this and to combat the scepticism have hired France’s most well known environmentalist, Tristan Lecomte. Together with his carbon management company, The Pure Project, he is helping Nestle Waters France execute their carbon offset scheme.

Nestle Waters France produce on average 115,000 tonnes of carbon a year from their Vittel mineral water production in France and Belgium. In order to offset this they are funding the plantation of 350,000 trees in an existing project in the Bolivian Amazon as well as a new one in the Peruvian jungle. In the long term they expect to be renewing the same number of trees every year.

What may have attracted Mr Lecomte to this job would be the chance for him to work with some old friends. Such as, the cocoa farmers from the remote village of Santa Rosa as well as other communities that live in the high forest along side the Huayabamba River. Already Lecomte has visited this village six times on behalf of his company Alter Eco, which makes award winning fair trade and organic chocolate.

“These are some of the best cocoa farmers you can find in the world,” he says as the villagers gathered to greet him in the cool of the evening. “They are organic, they benefit from fair trade and now they will plant trees to fight against global warming.”

“They are at the forefront of the fight against climate change,” says Mr Lecomte. “The awareness here in the deep forest is much higher than in our cities because we don’t see it, it’s just on TV.”

Under the Pure Project farmers are paid one Peruvian sol, which is equivalent to 30 US cents for every tree seedling they plant on their land. Soon the seedlings (growing at a tropically accelerated rate) become saplings with dinner plate sized leaves that reach up to the sunlit cracks in the tree canopy. They can grow up to six metres within a year and once they reach the minimum legal diameter to be cut the farmer can harvest and sell them.

“On top from reforesting it’s a way of making money,” says cocoa farmer Ozwaldo del Castillo, 53. “We may be old when those trees are ready to be cut down, but our children and their children will benefit in the future,” the father of three says.

Thus agro-forestry provides a retirement fund of sorts for farmers as well as revitalising deforested and unproductive land. Another side benefit is that as cocoa trees grow best in the shade bigger tropical hardwood trees such as teak and cedar can be planted alongside them to provide these conditions. This means that the farmer is able to double his yield by up to 2,000 kilograms of cocoa beans per hectare per year.

“The benefits of reforestation activities are much larger than carbon offsetting only,” says Mr Lecomte. “When you reforest you preserve the water resources and the biodiversity, you increase and diversify the revenues of the farmers and, last but not least, you fight against climate change.”

Despite the scepticism that abounds regarding multinationals desire to offset their carbon footprint Mr Lecomte is undeterred. He is convinced that projects such as this can work and are the beginning of a much bigger trend.

“Multinationals now understand that they have to change their model if they want to be sustainable and small farmers have the key to develop sustainable projects,” he says. “It’s a trade. Sustainability is not an obstacle to the growth of big companies, quite the opposite it can be a strategic advantage.”

At present the Voluntary Carbon Standard is due to validate the Peruvian project by the end of July. In the meantime the Pure Project runs similar schemes in 14 other countries for a number of well known multinationals such as Clarins and Hugo Boss.

In the next five years the Pure Project plans to plant up to four million trees in the Peruvian Amazon. Should that go ahead 2.3 million tonnes of carbon would be captured over the next four decades.

In the modern market place green credibility has become increasingly more significant. It is hoped that grass roots projects such as this one could lend big corporations this important commodity. However this can only be achieved if the projects are managed efficiently and with a care for environmental impacts and not just economical ones.

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 6th, 2010 at 11:28 AM and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.