🌲 𝐋𝐞𝐭'𝐬 𝐭𝐚𝐥𝐤 𝐚𝐛𝐨𝐮𝐭 𝐭𝐫𝐞𝐞𝐬 🍃

This weekend, I had the amazing opportunity to visit the world's biggest trees: the giant sequoias of #California. The General Sherman - the largest tree (by volume) in the world - has been a formidable carbon storehouse, holding more than 300 tonnes of carbon for over 2,200 years. That's in a single tree! 🤯

A few facts to get us started:

🌱 On average, a mature tree can absorb around 48kg of carbon/year and will sequester around 1 ton of carbon over its lifetime.

🌍 Globally, forests are estimated to store about 296 gigatons of carbon. That's more than 8x what humanity emits per year!

🔥 Deforestation and forest degradation contribute to 15% of all greenhouse gas emissions.

🚫 The world loses around 10 million hectares of forest anually, equivalent to 27,000 hectares per day or 20 football fields per minute.

🛡️ Only about 15% of the world's forests are formally protected through national parks, nature reserves, and other conservation areas.

💡 Punch line: To fight climate change, we need to protect our forests. And frankly, we are simply not doing enough.

I firmly believe that, despite their shortcomings and critiques, carbon credits should play a role in helping us preserve our forests. Why? It's the best tool we've got. 💼

🏛️ Governments will play a central role, but they alone can't unlock the capital needed at the scale and speed required. We haven't found any other way besides carbon credits to put a commercial value on a tree, and we desperately need to channel billions, even trillions, to preserving our nature over the coming decades.

🌟 So, let's not write off using carbon credits to protect our forests. What we need are high-quality credits that actually deliver on their promise. I believe we can achieve this, especially with the advances in monitoring, reporting, and verification (#MRV) I'm seeing in the space. It's time to get to work and look after our forests, one tree at a time. 🌳👐

🤔 Do you agree? Have you seen better approaches? What needs to be done?