Both of us have spent many years working on climate change, and both of us could be described as big sceptics around ‘carbon offsetting’. This is partly because offsetting is too often used by big companies to salve guilty consciences while carrying on with polluting business as usual. But it is also because nearly all offsetting has historically involved emitting carbon pollution first, and then trying to draw it down from the atmosphere later (in many cases, much later).

That’s why we’re proud and very excited to now be launching a £38 million nature-based solutions programme with Aviva, which we believe fundamentally turns the traditional ‘offsetting’ model on its head, removing carbon fom the atmosphere before it can be emitted, while also funding the restoration and recovery of one of Britain's rarest and most precious woodland habitats now; our lost Atlantic rainforests.

These precious, romantic woods once covered much of the wet, west coast of Britain, from Cornwall to Scotland. But these days there are just a few fragments left that have become all the more special for their rarity.

The places that we will create, to reconnect our rainforests, will become beautiful havens for wildlife and for local communities. Their unique, damp conditions provided by their proximity to the Atlantic coast will allow luxuriant mosses and lichens to cloak the trunks of oaks, birch and willow.

The voluntary carbon market is growing at high speed, but much of the necessary governance and regulation needed for the global market is still missing. We have all heard stories of projects that are not only failing to remove carbon, but are also damaging wildlife and communities around them. When projects fail in this way, they are not nature-based solutions; they are anti-nature and anti-climate. Put simply, they’re greenwashing.

That’s why we, along with the rest of The Wildlife Trusts, have conducted an internal conversation across our federation for the past two years on our stance around carbon offsetting. We set out our collective position in our first Wildlife Trusts’ climate change statement last year.

We know we need nature to tackle climate change. The world cannot stabilise global temperature below 2°C – or stabilise it at any level – without carbon removals. Nature-based solutions are a vital part of the efforts to reduce global warming and adapt to its impacts; one study estimates that they could reduce peak warming by 0.3°C from a 2°C increase in global temperature. But they remain vastly underfunded; both in terms of what investment is needed to help address climate change and to turn the tide on biodiversity loss. We want to help to create a UK voluntary carbon market that works and plays its role in driving investment in nature. In addition, of great importance to us, nature-based solutions when done well should create a multitude of benefits for nature and for people and communities.

We have worked with Aviva for over a year to design a programme of work that will draw down and store carbon in woodlands, but which will also achieve so much more. Below are the key criteria we have established to ensure this happens.

Aviva is investing now to draw down carbon for the future

The Wildlife Trusts do not support any carbon credit scheme that enables mitigation avoidance, where a company only buys credits to ‘balance off’ greenhouse gas emissions without significant effort first to reduce them. The mitigation hierarchy and many global standards such as the Science-based Targets Initiative make a clear distinction; offsets can be used, but at the end of the process of reducing greenhouse gas emissions, after every effort possible has been made to eliminate them first.  This is what Aviva is doing.  The rainforest programme will create woodland carbon removals to balance off future, not current, emissions. Those removals will only be counted once they actually exist; getting around another problem where companies claim to have balanced their emissions already, but are investing in projects that haven’t yet created any removals. 

Aviva has shown it is taking real action to reduce its emissions before looking to removals. Between 2010 and 2021, Aviva cut its own operational greenhouse gas emissions (known as its scope 1 and 2 emissions) by 66%; and ensured that the detail was publicly disclosed and demonstrable. It has also committed to become net zero in its own operations by 2030, so the unavoidable emissions to which carbon credits will be applied beyond 2040 will be restricted only to those from its portfolio of wider investments (scope 3 emissions). 

We are putting in place transparent checks and balances

High standard carbon offsets must meet a variety of criteria to ensure that carbon removals are real, durable, and additional to what might have happened otherwise.  All of these criteria are met in our programme. We would not have been able to undertake our rainforest restoration without the investment from Aviva, and the woodlands we will be creating would not otherwise exist; hence the scheme will be additional.  The Wildlife Trusts will manage the sites in perpetuity, ensuring that the trees we plant are not removed at a later date and are carefully managed for the long-term; this is core to our charitable objectives. Our efforts to protect our woodlands from climate change hazards will also help to protect their carbon.  We will be using the Woodland Carbon Code to transparently report on progress, and importantly we will undertake a range of monitoring and reporting on the benefits of the scheme, which include but go far beyond carbon.

This is not merely a carbon offsets programme; it is a nature, climate adaptation and people programme

The Wildlife Trusts helped to pilot the IUCN Nature-based Solutions Standard, which sets out the need for any nature-based solutions project to fulfil multiple criteria to ensure they are sustainable and well-managed.  Our programme has biodiversity, adaptation and community wellbeing at its heart.

We cannot ignore that the climate is changing and we take climate change adaptation extremely seriously. As well as situating our scheme in one of the wettest areas of the country, we will use a wide variety of broadleaf species that exist in Atlantic rainforests, and do everything in our power to reduce the risk to the new woodlands from fire, disease and drought. We will model future changes to the climatic conditions for the chosen sites and think through how we can make our woodlands as resilient as possible to the increasingly extreme conditions they will need to cope with. We will measure the benefits that the new woodlands are providing to reduce extreme weather impacts in turn, such as extreme heat or flooding.

We will work very closely with local communities, ensuring that the nature reserves that are created from this program are designed with people living and working in the local area, in line with how we manage our nature reserves across the UK. As part of this approach, we aim to increase opportunities for people in local communities to gain employment and will seek to make all sites accessible to the public. Rainforests will add considerably to the beauty and cultural heritage of the areas where they’re restored and do much to boost green tourism.

Aviva are to be applauded for investing in all of the benefits of these new rainforests; for nature, climate change adaptation and people, as well as carbon. We’re delighted to be delivering this British rainforest programme for Aviva; and delighted to be moving forward the debate on how nature-based solutions can and should be done well.

Craig Bennett is Chief Executive of The Wildife Trusts (follow on Twitter @CraigBennett3)

Kathryn Brown is Director of Climate Change and Evidence at The Wildlife Trusts (follow on Twitter @KathrynABrown)