Investing in forests

Investing in the planting and protection of native species propels conservation and indigenous reforestation while also sequestering carbon, he says, calling Ekos projects the “single malt whiskey” of carbon credit farming.

Sean’s forestry PhD was focussed on forest conservation financing and rural economic development. As a senior lecturer in environmental studies at Victoria University, he was increasingly concerned by the climate crisis, and by a lack of awareness and action around it. In 2009, he stepped out of academia and into carbon markets, seeing the ability to tackle climate change and conservation through the establishment of Ekos.

The social purpose business works on both the supply and demand side of the carbon market, with supply achieved through helping landowners establish, verify and manage indigenous reforestation carbon projects, from auditing to pest control. When it comes to carbon credit demand, Ekos helps companies voluntarily measure and verify their carbon footprint in the first instance, then develop and implement a carbon reduction plan, starting with low and medium hanging fruit.

Some emissions are so high in the tree they are impossible to eliminate or are financially prohibitive, including the likes of the concrete beneath a winery. So the third task is to offset carbon emissions that cannot be reduced, through investing in local and international permanent indigenous forests.

New Zealand craft brewer Garage Project, for example, choose to offset their unavoidable emissions through carbon credits from the Rarakau Forest Carbon Project in Southland, which protects and enhances lowland, coastal rainforest on Māori land, tackling climate change as well as forest conservation, says Sean. That’s one of several planting, regeneration and conservation projects Ekos has in New Zealand, with rainforest conservation projects in the Pacific as well, offering communities the opportunity to make a living from forests without having to chop them down.

In some cases, supply and demand are in the same value chain, with a company insetting its emissions by registering their own plantings for carbon credits, as in the case of Dog Point Vineyards.

Sean challenges arguments deriding carbon offsetting as a “licence to pollute” saying that people already wield such a licence every day, with electricity, driving, flying, freighting goods and buying food all examples of legally sanctioned fossil fuel use that ramp up carbon emissions. Ekos only looks to carbon offsetting as part of an ambitious emissions reduction effort that starts with measuring and understanding the company footprint.

In a blog on the Ekos site, Sean writes that Hawke’s Bay alone needs about 200,000 hectares planted in permanent forest to cope with climate change. The taxpayer cannot afford the billions of dollars in investment required to do that across New Zealand, he writes. “But carbon buyers and private investors can.”