15 Million Trees Planted for Carbon Sequestration

ATLANTA, Georgia, March 29, 2002 (ENS) - Environmental Synergy, Inc. (ESI), an Atlanta based environmental services company, has this month planted its 15 millionth tree in the Lower Mississippi River Valley under a mission to restore bottomland hardwood habitat and remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

Carbon sequestration through reforestation is one of several strategies to which companies are turning in an effort to offset their emissions of carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas linked to climate change. Growing trees absorb carbon dioxide and store it as carbon.

Bottomland hardwood forest in Louisiana (Photo courtesy National Wetlands Research Center)

While the Bush administration's new climate change initiative does not call for mandatory measures to reduce or offset greenhouse gas emissions, many companies are voluntarily undertaking such measures. The U.S. Department of Energy, through its Voluntary Reporting of Greenhouse Gases Program, allows companies to establish a public record of emissions reductions or sequestration achievements in a national database.

"AEP has been planting trees for decades as part of its surface mining reclamation and land stewardship practice," said Gary Kaster, AEP eco-assets manager. "Since the mid-1990s, as concerns about climate change have risen, AEP has been involved in reforestation and forest preservation projects to capture and store carbon to offset emissions of carbon dioxide.

"These are voluntary efforts with an eye to using the verified tons of sequestered carbon to comply with emission limits under a future carbon cap program," he said, referring to the Bush administration's proposal to establish a greenhouse gas emissions trading market.

ESI concentrates its reforestation initiatives in the Lower Mississippi River Valley, stretching from Illinois to Louisiana. The valley has suffered severe habitat destruction over the past 50 years, losing 80 percent of its original 22 million acres of bottomland hardwood ecosystems to agricultural development.

"Carbon sequestration through reforestation offers the greatest opportunity of our lifetime to restore biodiversity back to the Lower Mississippi River Valley," said Sam Hamilton, southeast regional director for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. "Restoring bottomland hardwood habitat will help endangered species, declining populations of neotropical migratory songbirds and resident wildlife."

Louisiana black bear (Photo courtesy Black Bear Conservation Committee)

"In addition to habitat restoration and carbon sequestration benefits, there are other collateral benefits to reforestation," Hamilton said. "Soil conservation, enhanced water quality, improved recreational opportunity and reduction in the hypoxia zone of the Gulf of Mexico are all positive outcomes of this reforestation program."

Scientists have documented a large area of the Louisiana continental shelf in the Gulf of Mexico with seasonally depleted oxygen levels so low that most aquatic species cannot survive. The zone of oxygen depletion, the hypoxia zone, forms in the middle of the most important commercial and recreational fisheries in the lower 48 states. Reforestation may reduce the excess runoff from land based activities that contributes to the oxygen depletion.