Unpacking Carbon Sequestration in UVM’s Comprehensive Sustainability Plan By Emma Polhemus
Cotopaxi. Klean Kanteen. REI Co-op. All of these familiar brands, which you probably spot across campus regularly, are “Certified Climate Neutral” by the independent organization Change Climate. Climate and carbon neutrality have become some of the latest environmental buzzwords that indicate a business’s commitment to sustainability. There are even companies that allow you to purchase personal carbon offsets to reduce your own carbon footprint. I understand the basics of what this means: we are releasing a dangerous amount of greenhouse gasses into our atmosphere, and climate neutrality avoids contributing to that problem by producing net zero emissions—in other words, if the provisioning of a product or service adds any greenhouse gasses to the atmosphere, it’s offset by something that takes carbon dioxide back out. As close to home as we can get, carbon neutrality plays a starring role in the Comprehensive Sustainability Plan (CSP) published by the University of Vermont in the spring of 2023. UVM has pledged to achieve carbon neutrality by 2030, and the most significant portion of this goal over the next seven years will come in the form of purchasing forest carbon offsets in the state of Vermont. Carbon offsetting is billed as a much-needed action against the climate crisis, but I can’t help but second guess these promises. It’s nice to think that when you purchase a carbon offset, all those greenhouse gasses just Headwaters Magazine 29
disappear, but they do have to go somewhere. The question is, where? Are carbon offsets actually beneficial, or are they the climate equivalent of shoving a basket of dirty laundry in the closet and pretending it’s not there? As with any environmental solution, I’m sure there are tradeoffs. I want to find out what carbon sequestration means in the context of our global environmental future. To learn more about carbon sequestration in Vermont, I spoke with Jim Shallow, Director of Strategic Conservation Initiatives at the Vermont Chapter of the Nature Conservancy (TNC). TNC has several carbon sequestration projects in the state of Vermont, including the Burnt Mountain Natural Area and the Forest Carbon Aggregation project in the Cold Hollow region, created in partnership with the Vermont Land Trust. These projects are designed to tackle TNC’s global goals of preventing biodiversity loss and responding to climate change. In order to limit global temperature increases to 1.5℃, “there is a need at a global level to not only reduce the amount of carbon we’re putting into the atmosphere,” Shallow explained: but to [also] start removing carbon from the atmo sphere that we’ve already put up there. Our research here at the Nature Conservancy is showing that nature can play a key role in helping sequester that carbon, store it over time, and help us lower the amount of overall carbon in [the atmosphere.]
