I’m a huge supporter of conservation and reforestation. Protecting forests, restoring peatlands, rebuilding mangroves, these are some of the smartest investments we can make as a society.

They protect biodiversity, secure water systems, stabilise soils, and create local livelihoods. But here’s the uncomfortable truth. None of it is fully sustainable if we don’t also measure and reduce emissions across every sector of the economy. Without rigorous carbon accounting and real reductions, nature projects risk becoming a feel-good alibi for business as usual.

Why? Because climate change is a mathematical problem before it’s a marketing problem. We’re adding greenhouse gases to the atmosphere faster than nature can safely remove them. A mature forest is brilliant at storing carbon, but it takes decades to get there, and it’s potentially vulnerable to fire, drought and policy changes. Meanwhile, one poorly managed supply chain can undo those gains in a single reporting year. If we don’t cut the flow at the tap, energy, transport, industrial processes, materials, then mopping up with trees will never keep pace.

There are four realities we need to face.

Timescale. Emissions from a flight, a boiler, or a diesel fleet hit the atmosphere today. A newly planted tree might take thirty to forty years to deliver its promised storage, if it reaches maturity at all. That gap matters.

Permanence. Forests burn. Peat dries. Land use changes. If stored carbon returns to the atmosphere, it was never a permanent solution. We can manage this risk, but we can’t pretend it doesn’t exist.

Leakage. Protect a forest here and logging can move there. Without robust accounting and jurisdictional approaches, we simply push the problem across a border.

Saturation. Natural systems have limits. You can’t plant your way out of an unlimited fossil problem. We must shrink the fossil problem itself.

This is why carbon accounting is the backbone of credible sustainability. When we measure properly, three things happen.

We get clarity. A robust inventory, built around Scope 1, 2 and 3, shows where emissions truly sit. Most organisations discover the bulk is in their value chain, purchased goods, capital goods, logistics, use of sold products. You can’t manage what you can’t see and you can’t lead what you don’t measure.

We get priorities. With the data in hand, you can target the few levers that move the needle. Switching high-carbon materials, redesigning products, electrifying fleets, re-routing freight, decarbonising heat, moving to renewable power, and working with suppliers to cut process emissions. Intensity metrics, per £ revenue, per unit produced, per square metre cleaned or fitted-out, let you track progress credibly through growth.

We get integrity. Good accounting avoids double counting, sets baselines, and forces transparency in claims. If you’re going to say “carbon neutral,” “net zero,” or “climate contribution,” the evidence has to match the words. Standards matter here, not as decorations, but as guardrails.

So where does conservation and reforestation fit? At the right stage, and for the right claim. High-integrity nature projects are valuable, often essential, and absolutely worth supporting. But they’re not a licence to pollute. The right order of operations is simple:

1. Measure your full footprint with care, including Scope 3.
2. Reduce aggressively across your operations and supply chain, near-term and long-term, with clear targets, budgets and owners.
3. Switch to lower-carbon energy and materials as standard practice, not as pilots.
4. Engage suppliers with real data, not vague asks, share methods, set expectations, and reward progress.
5. Only then use high-quality, independently verified projects to address genuinely hard to abate residuals. And be precise about the claim you’re making.

There’s also a language point that matters. The market has blurred “offsetting,” “insetting,” “credits,” and “contributions” until they sound interchangeable. They aren’t. The most responsible path today is to focus your public claim on reductions in your own value chain and, if you support external projects, frame them as a contribution. You can be proud of those contributions without pretending they neutralise a footprint that’s still largely powered by fossil energy.

What does “good” look like in practice?

• Procurement with teeth. Write carbon into specifications the way you write safety and price. Require supplier intensity data, not just feel-good policies. If your suppliers can’t provide it, help them learn, then make it a condition of doing business.
• Design choices up front. Most of a product’s lifetime emissions are locked in at the drawing board. Fewer materials, circular options, and low-carbon inputs beat end-of-pipe fixes every time.
• Energy and heat as non-negotiables. Renewables, electrification, and heat pumps where feasible, power purchase agreements when appropriate, metering and controls as standard.
• Logistics that serve the carbon budget. Smarter routing, modal shifts, full loads, right-sized vehicles, and, where it fits, electrification or certified low-carbon fuels.
• Clear governance. Carbon reduction targets tied to leadership KPIs, reported regularly, and verified. No targets without funding, no plans without owners.

And yes, support conservation and reforestation. Do it because you value nature, communities, and resilience. Back projects that are additional, well-managed, and transparently monitored. Prefer programmes with long-term stewardship, strong baselines, and credible verification. If you’re in a sector with residuals that are currently hard to eliminate, durable removals (including high-quality nature-based solutions) can play a legitimate role, after you’ve demonstrated reductions in your own house.

There’s a commercial angle here too. The direction of travel is not in doubt. Regulation is tightening, customers are demanding data, finance is pricing climate risk and large buyers are pushing requirements down their supply chains. “We planted some trees” will not secure your place on a tender list for long. A credible carbon reduction plan, evidenced, auditable, and tied to real activity certainly will.

I often say to clients: don’t confuse activity with progress. A photo ready tree planting day is activity. A contract that requires supplier emissions intensity to fall year-on-year is progress. A glossy biodiversity story is activity. A redesigned product that removes a high-carbon component is progress. We should celebrate both only when the second follows the first.

The sustainability community has sometimes been its own worst enemy here. In our eagerness to involve people, we’ve allowed easy gestures to masquerade as strategy. The task now is to be generous and exacting: welcome people in, then guide them beyond the quick wins to the engineering, procurement and operational changes that actually cut emissions. Compassion and rigour are not opposites; they’re the combination that works.

So let’s hold two truths at once. Conservation and reforestation are essential allies. They restore life, protect communities and, at their best, remove and store carbon for the long term. But they cannot carry the weight of a global decarbonisation plan on their own. The only honest path is to measure everything, reduce what we control, influence what we buy and sell, and support high-integrity projects for what remains. That’s how we convert good intentions into climate impact and how we move from planting promises to keeping them.

Alan Stenson, CEO

Neutral Carbon Zone