In the journey to minimize the impact of companies, governments and even individuals on the environment, issues such as creating a positive climate impact and going beyond zero emissions to negative emissions are increasingly on the agenda. The first practices that come to mind for this - if we leave carbon capture and storage technologies aside - are to cease activities that reduce the carbon sequestration capacity of natural carbon sinks and disrupt the carbon cycle, and to improve the quality of carbon sinks to restore their carbon sequestration capacity to what it was before human activities.

In fact, this issue is already included in the environmental impact assessment reports of the projects developed by many companies as an obligation to restore the environment to the conditions before the company's activities. Considering that many companies have a legal obligation to eliminate the environmental impact, this actually necessitates an increase in site-specific biodiversity monitoring parameters by eliminating or even avoiding the current impact of restorative operations. We can also think of investment in biodiversity and restorative operations as a window of opportunity that can open the door to carbon neutrality and even negativity for emission-intensive industries that are stuck with clean development mechanisms (CDM) and carbon markets.

The first step is for companies to eliminate the damage to the sites where they operate, to repair the disrupted carbon cycle in these sites, and to restore the damaged ecological elements to the site. The assets owned by many companies may be insufficient to neutralize or even reverse the resulting environmental impact, and these assets may not even be carbon sinks. For companies that do not have the opportunity to do anything other than landscaping their assets, it becomes imperative to spread restorative activities throughout the stakeholder network and to disseminate good practices that reduce environmental impact along the value chain and practices that enable “carbon embedding”.

For example, companies that process food or produce textiles from natural fibers should support the dissemination of good practices in agricultural production, which is already a carbon-negative process by nature, in order to eliminate the impact that occurs during agricultural activities in the value chain... Within the scope of these good practices, the opportunity to “bury carbon” by preserving and increasing the amount of organic matter in the soil can be evaluated, while reducing the water footprint and reducing the use of pesticides and herbicides. Such improvements along the value chain can, of course, neutralize the lifetime impact of a product, but the emissions generated during the transportation, processing, consumption and disposal of a product often require larger restorative operational steps to become carbon neutral.

So what can companies that want to be carbon neutral or even carbon negative in their value chain but do not have carbon sinks in their own hands or in the hands of stakeholders they can cooperate with in the value chain do? In this case, creating a “beyond the value chain” impact comes to the fore, and one of the first examples that comes to mind is reforestation projects. When many variables such as the growth rate of trees, variability in rainfall regime and temperature, soil structure come into play, the validity of carbon sequestration calculations and whether they can actually offset a company's annual emissions is an important issue... Because we need several earth's surface areas to achieve carbon zero targets!

In addition, we should take note of what experts say after forest fires: to minimize intervention in fire areas and to take great care even in the removal of burning logs. Not contributing to biodiversity and ecosystem restoration and removing the elements that threaten the protected area may be the most modest but the biggest restorative steps to be taken. While doing what needs to be done with the least amount of energy, the least amount of intervention and the least amount of input can maximize the restorative effect, what about the tree-planting competition that companies engage in?

We observe more and more that the “environmental protection” steps taken and their results are being questioned, and that their effects on biodiversity and emission reductions are reflected in the reporting world. While all these developments are accelerating and expectations from companies are becoming concrete, we need a ground where carbon neutrality projects based on a sound methodology and restorative operations that improve carbon sinks become widespread in order not to be exposed to greenwashing with practices carried out in the value chain or afforestation projects. It is up to all of us to question the soundness of this ground and open the doors to a carbon-negative world!

Murat Unal / 30.12.2022