Q: What happens to my £ 10.00?

A:

Q: Will I be able to visit the forest?

A: Yes you will. Please go to ’the forests’ link at the bottom of this page for directions.Back to Top.

Q: When will my tree be planted?

A: We only plant deciduous trees - those that lose their leaves in winter, as they are better than conifers at promoting ecological diversity. It is only possible to plant these once they become dormant in the autumn. We will plant your tree between October and March and send you an e-mail certification of planting shortly afterwards. Back to Top.

Q. How much CO2 does a tree absorb over its life?

A. How much CO2 a tree will absorb over its life will depend on numerous factors including, amongst other things, its species; where it is grown; how it is looked after; and its individual genetic make up. Trees, like us humans are carbon based life-forms and they use the suns energy to withdraw carbon from the air to use in myriad ways in their internal cell chemistry. They mostly take it in through small pores on the undersides of their leaves as gaseous CO2 . While there are times, particularly at night, when trees give off more CO2 than they absorb, the net overall balance of CO2 flow is always into the tree rather than the other way around.

A piece of dried timber weighing 100 Kgs will contain ~ 45 Kgs of carbon fixed from the atmosphere. Because trees use the suns energy to split CO2 into carbon and oxygen, it turns out that when you take the oxygen into account the tree is actually fixing an amount of CO2 that is more than its own dry weight! Chemists use the term CO2 (e) or equivalent to describe this. Without going into the atomic chemistry this means for our purposes that:

100Kgs of dried timber contain 45Kgs of carbon which is equivalent to 165Kgs of atmospheric CO2.

The precise amount that any tree will absorb will obviously depend on how much it weighs at maturity. Here in Wales, Beech trees for example, can grow up to a weight of 5 Tonnes or more. Since roughly 50% of a tree is water, a mature Beech will have fixed CO2 according to the following equation. 2.5 X 1.65 = 4.125 Tonnes of CO2. Smaller trees such as Birch and Willow will fix smaller quantities of CO2. We recommend that our customers select the larger species such as Beech, Ash and Oak if they are looking to ensure parity between the CO2 the tree will fix and the CO2 released in their flight. For illustration purposes and as a very rough guide, a return economy flight from London to New York and back will release approximately 1.5 tonnes of CO2.

Source - ESA 21. National Science Foundation. (U.S.A.) Back to Top.

Q. Does it matter where I am Flying?

A. No. Because we all share the same atmosphere, the destructive effects of a flight and the beneficial effects of a tree being planted are the same irrespective of the where these happen. Back to Top.

Q. Some recent research indicates that planting trees in temperate latitudes doesn't help the climate. What is the response of Treeflights to this?

A. The valuable climatic modelling research by Ken Caldiera, Govindasamy Bala etal of the Carnegie Institute/ Lawrence Livermore Laboratories needs to be taken seriously by offset treeplanters in northern latitudes but there are a number of reasons why this work will not accurately predict the temperature effects of the forest planting work that we do at Treeflights.

1. The model used appears to take no account of the emissive effects of alternate land uses. It posits the temperature effects of mature forest canopy vis-a-vis bare ground/pasture.To explain this. The land we are planting on was hitherto used as pasture for methane generating ruminant animals. Methane is more than 20 times more 'warming' than CO2 and the U.N. estimates that human agriculture is responsible for 18-19% of all anthropogenic ghg emissions. When we replace grazing pasture with trees we get the added benefit of a reduction in atmospheric methane concentrations. No account of this is taken in this research.

2. Global climatic modelling of this kind can help us to understand in outline terms, the complexities of the interactions between oceans, forests and the atmosphere. However it can never accurately predict the temperature effects of treeplanting on a local or even regional level. To give an example. The land we are planting on is north facing. The reason for this is simple. North facing land in the northern hemisphere is generally cheaper than south facing land because it receives less solar insolation and is thus less productive agriculturally. For most of the winter, the sun doesn't even touch the land we work on! What this means is that the warming effect of a mature forest canopy, in terms of its reduced albedo (reflectivity) as envisaged by this model does not really apply.

3. The model uses a 'slab' or uniform representation of the earths oceans. i.e. The oceans are given a uniform temperature and there is no attempt to incorporate the complexities of the planets ocean circulation in the calculations. Obviously this is quite a gross simplification of what is one of the main drivers of global climate. Given that the earth is 70% water- covered and the deep-sea currents undeniably influence our climate on a massive scale , this appears to be an area of inevitable inaccuracy.

4. The model posits the temperature effects of mature, natural, forest canopy, covering entire areas of the planet. Now this is never going to happen. We need land for a myriad of other uses so forests can never cover all the surface, however much some of us may want this. There will be massive breaks in the cover that will allow 'albedo cooling'. Furthermore we are planting managed woodland and so can tailor our planting to minimise the envisaged warming effect of a close canopy. As mentioned above we can plant on north facing slopes. We can select species such as Ash that are inherently more reflective than say, Beech or Oak as they only retain their leaves for 5-6 months of the year and these leaves are in any case slender and shiny. Also we can manage the woodland to improve its albedo by leaving open spaces, planting the trees further apart and by ensuring a wide diversity of tree types. The result of this is that the trees will mature at different rates and thus be harvested at different times so ensuring that rather than having one complete area of mature canopy, we have a dynamic situation where individual trees are cut down and replaced as they mature. This means that the woodland will never represent the dense mature canopy that this model is based on.

5. The logical development of this research (however much the authors may cavil at this) is that, if serious about attacking global warming, we should consider cutting down trees in temperate and boreal zones. They can't have it both ways. Either trees are cooling in temperate regions or warming. If they are warming then they have to go! This to me is the most dangerous repercussion of this work. According to this research we now have to acknowledge the arrival the new climate criminals - British deciduous trees! Back to Top.

Q. What is the long term management plan for the Treeflights Forests?

A. Our forest management plan is informed by two guiding principles. Our primary objective is to facilitate the lock-up of carbon from atmospheric CO2 in the trees' timber for as long as possible. Our secondary aim is to encourage a high degree of biodiversity in (and community access to) the woodland.

If a tree grows in a forest and then dies, falls over and decomposes the carbon that it has absorbed over its lifetime will flow back quite quickly to the air. If this happens, there is no real, (long term) gain in terms of the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere. One of the most cogent and often repeated criticisms of offset treeplanting is that the carbon storage afforded by a tree is very temporary. It is said that carbon is effectively being transferred from the permanent sink provided by the underground hydrocarbon fossil fuel reserve (of coal and crude oil) into the atmosphere and then offset by 'temporary' storage in the woody tissues of the tree. At Treeflights we take this criticism very seriously and have designed our long term forest management plan to address the salient issues.
Firstly, we are creating a charitable trust, the Treeflights Trust, to hold ownership, in perpetuity, of the land on which the trees are planted. In this way we can reassure our customers that the forests that they are creating will be completely secure. The governing document of the Treeflights Trust states that:
" the purpose of this trust is to maintain and nurture the Treeflights Forests in such a way as to (A) minimise flowback of carbon to the atmosphere as CO2 and (B) to encourage biodiversity and community access to these forests".

Currently we are looking at 2 main long term options for the timber that will be produced by the forests. (All the trees we grow are types that may ultimately be used for timber.)
The first option is to harvest the trees into construction timber at maturity, preserve in an eco-friendly way and then use for house building and other construction uses in the local community in the normal way. If hardwood timber is kept dry (i.e. in the roof of a house) it can last for many hundreds of years without relinquishing its carbon.
The second option is to harvest the timber into large baulks and dump in the nearby sea. Although this may appear wasteful in terms of a useful resource it appears to be the best option with regard to reducing the flowback of carbon to the atmosphere as CO2. In the anaerobic conditions of the sea floor hardwood can last without decomposing for a very, very long time. The way to understand this is to consider how well preserved are the oak keel timbers that made up the Viking longships that sank in the North sea in the period A.D. 700 - 1100. Most of these ships sank more than 1000 years ago and in many cases are very well preserved.
With both of the above options there will be residual material that is too small to use either for construction or for burying at sea. This material is known as brash to foresters and rather than let it lie on the forest floor and decompose it is envisaged that a better use for it would be as a fuel source to supplant fossil fuel use.
Once the trees have been cut down (~100 years), the whole process of forest establishment can begin again on the same site. At Treeflights we have coined the term "Sequestration Farm" to describe this process by which one plot of land may be used again and again to withdraw CO2 from the atmosphere using the suns abundant energy. In a way what we are trying to do here, is to make a start re-creating the earths fossil reserves of stored solar energy and in doing so re-absorb all the carbon that we humans have all been so good at pumping into our atmosphere. Does this seem like a hopeless task to you? Well, we are going to need all our reserves of hopeless optimism to get on top of this problem. Back to Top.