In the fight against climate change, even small actions in different fronts takes them to the right direction towards a cleaner future. This Christmas Leanheat has used their gift budget for obtaining a carbon sink produced by Puuni Ltd.
Suonsaari carbon sink, located in the city of Mikkeli Finland, will offset 200 thousand kilograms CO2 during the next hundred years by the growth of 600 tree plants. The amount of CO2 equals over a million kilometers of mileage by car or about 230 return flights between Helsinki and New York.
Credible carbon compensation
The Suonsaari carbon sink will be commenced in spring 2020 by reforestation of former farmland which doesn’t support the growth of trees naturally due to excess growth of hay. Puuni Ltd. is a Finnish-based company with a single purpose – removing CO2 from the atmosphere. They created new carbon sinks in Finland by reforestation and they do it jointly with municipalities. All the reforestation is done to unused lands where trees do not grow naturally. Forest’s natural biodiversity is part of all the carbon sinks.
With Puuni, companies get a transparent, easily understandable, and efficient way to compensate. The most important requirement for credible carbon compensation is the additionality of the carbon sinks, meaning that removal of CO2 would not occur ‘in any case’. Puuni’s carbon sinks are made by reforestation and do locate in municipalities’ owned waste lands, former farmland, land fill hills and highway noise barriers, places where strong hay growth prevents natural forestation.
Enduring global warming
Planting and caretaking of a new forest will also create jobs in the partner municipalities
Planting and caretaking of a new forest will also create jobs in the partner municipalities. Puuni plants only the number of trees that is equal to the amount of compensated CO2 by companies. If compensation does not take place, no CO2 will be removed from the atmosphere – making the additionality event stronger.
All Puuni’s reforestation projects do consider biodiversity, offering ecological niches for a large variety of different mammal, bird, and insect species, and are resilient against tree diseases enduring global warming.
Soil carbon storage
Their carbon sinks have the permanence of 100 years and in best cases, municipalities turn them into natural reserves. The amount of CO2 removed from the atmosphere is calculated by Natural Resources Institute Finland (LUKE) by calculating the growth of biomass using Motti-simulator and by calculating the soil carbon storage change using Yasso-model (both are modern state-of-art calculation models).
LUKE’s knowledge about boreal forests is a pioneer. The project description of Puuni’s carbon sinks are documented according to Land Use, Land-Use Change, and Forestry (LULUCF) Guidance for GHG Project Accounting.