AFG offsets its carbon footprint by reforesting forests affected by wildfires.
The Forestry Association of Galicia (AFG) has just completed the process of offsetting its carbon footprint, which includes all emissions associated with its activities, mainly advising forest owners and community woodlands, both in the forest and at the Association's offices (Santiago and Ponteareas).
The Carbon Footprint, Offsetting and CO2 Absorption Projects Registry of the Ministry for the Ecological Transition has just accredited that AFG has offset its carbon footprint through forest restoration projects in areas affected by fires.
For now, Spanish regulations provide two avenues for entities and companies that, on a voluntary basis and as part of their corporate social responsibility, wish to offset their emissions with carbon-absorption projects. These avenues are the reforestation of forests affected by wildfires or the planting of forest areas that have been denuded since at least 1989.
In both lines, the Ministry's Registry calculates the CO2 absorption of the projects taking into account the commitment to maintain the restored mass.
The Forestry Association of Galicia's carbon footprint was offset through projects included in the Galicia Rexenera programme, with which the Association, in collaboration with community woodlands, is promoting the restoration of forest areas affected by fires.
Context
After the autumn 2017 wildfires, which had devastated more than 50,000 hectares of woodland in just a few days, the AFG launched the Galicia Regenerates programme. Through this initiative, work was carried out to restore the areas affected by the fires, with the subsequent registration of the reforested woodlands in the Carbon Footprint and CO2 Absorption Projects Register.
Once those surfaces are registered in the aforementioned Registry, with the validation of the Ministry for the Ecological Transition, any entity or company interested in voluntarily offsetting its emissions can purchase the corresponding carbon credits generated by those projects from the forest owners.
This is the process that the Forestry Association itself has just completed, in the same way that any public or private entity interested in voluntarily offsetting its emissions could do.
