In 2021 I wrote a blogpost about the carbon banking plans of Microsoft and Rabobank. The aim of their project was to plant trees on a area spanning 15 million hectares and thus compensate CO₂ of 150 Mton in 2025.

I failed to reproduce these numbers: with the En-ROADS climate simulator I estimated that the carbon sequestration by these trees would be around 24 Mton by 2025. That is a factor 6 lower than the claim by Rabobank.

A recent article by Follow the Money points out that research by the agency Preferred by Nature has shown that "the amount of carbon sequestered according to Rabobank was overestimated up to 600 percent". Rabobank happily keeps on issuing carbon credits which have only been verified by an internal model. The conflict of interest is hard to miss.Follow the Money already described [problems with carbon credits] before (https://www.ftm.eu/articles/south-pole-kariba-carbon-emission?share=k5hzcREyhL6n2OjqMchvQDmY5%2F5b3Nz%2FQq%2BXN2G%2FRMjMYB1DQIpTdZYVl%2F0z168%3D)

The shortcomings of this project are a good illustration of technocratic tunnel vision: we take satelite images of the rain forest, and that way we can proof that we are sequestering extra CO₂. Sounds foolproof, right? Well, other parties are also working on restoring forests. Follow the Money mentioned the Worldbank, the Agence Française de Développement, the German ministry of Economic cooperation and development, the EU én the World Cacao Foundation. So yes, there are more trees in the regions observed by Rabobank and Microsoft, but can they take all credit for that?

On top of that human emissions are so high that the number of trees we can plant is entirely insufficient to compensate emissions. Even if we'd plant additional trees on an area twice the size of India AND change to regenerative agriculare on a large scale AND prevent deforestation wherever possible, we can sequester about 4 Gton of CO₂ per year in 2080 (the green area in the graph). At the same time the current emissions of energy production are roughly 35 Gton CO₂ per year (the gray area in the graph.

Initiatives to plant trees often suggest that forests can "can function like an infinitely absorbent mop to clean up the ever increasing flood of human caused CO₂ emissions" wrote Bonny Waring, but that is an illusion. Read the article There aren't enough trees in the world to offset society's carbon emissions-and there will never be Sherlock Holmes already knew: carbon credits are a dubious business.