We have recently been taking a focused look at our overseas environmental programming at the request of our friends in Sierra Leone, Honduras, and Guatemala. While CAUSE Canada has always recognized a healthy environment as the cornerstone of just and sustainable societies, our partners have asked us to give more specific attention to climate change. After all, people are dependent on natural processes, plants, and animals for our survival, and the more direct one's relationship with nature, the more vulnerable one is to the type of shocks that climate change brings.

The Christian scriptures teach that we are called to cultivate, serve and protect the earth. The instruction to "be fruitful and multiply" (Gen. 1:22) applies not only to humankind, but also to all life forms. In order to ensure that future generations continue to benefit from earth's abundance and diversity, CAUSE Canada has developed a community development carbon offset program.

What is carbon offsetting?
As we work to minimize our greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, carbon offsetting is offered as a means of compensating for those emissions that we are so far unable to cut. The premise is simple: the consumer calculates his or her GHG emissions and donates enough money to reduce, avoid, or sequester an equal volume of GHG. The outcome is that the consumer's activies are "carbon-neutral," not contributing to overall increases in GHG in the atmosphere.

Our carbon offset program is revitalizing and expanding our reforestation programs in Guatemala. CAUSE Canada's carbon offset program will also invest in landfill gas utilization, biogas digestion, and plastic recycling programs in each of our partner countries - programs that will help fight climate change while offering employment, livelihood opportunities, cleaner air and water, and safer communities for our friends overseas.

Forests are often called the Earth's lungs, absorbing carbon and emitting oxygen, cleaning the air we all need to survive. But forests do so much more than that. Preventing erosion and landslides through stabilizing soil, providing shade, habitat and food for 80% of all terrestial life, cleaning water, and sustaining the livelihoods of 1.6 billion people are just a few of the reasons to celebrate what forests do and to pursue their sustainable use. That’s why the United Nations has declared 2011 to be the International Year of Forests!

Current deforestation rates, however, threaten to turn forests from climate assets fo climate deficites. Because trees absorb and use carbon for life, when they die that carbon os returned to the atmosphere. That means, as we cut trees, we lose carbon-sequestering capacity in addition to releasing stored carbon to the air. Deforestation releases 2 billion tons of carbon annually. That's as much as the entire population of Canada flying from Vancouver to St. John's every 2 weeks, and it accounts for 25% of all human-caused carbon emissions.

Perhaps most dangerously, tripical deforestation decreases local precipitation and exposes soil to compaction and/or erosion, making it extremely difficult to reestablish forests where they once were.

40% of all Central American rainforest has been cleared or burned in the last 4 decades, mostly to graze beef cattle for export to North America.

Deforestation is one of the greatest threats to lives and livelihoods in Central America. In the Guatemalan Highlands, steep and denuded hillsides mean massive topsoil erosion, water contamination, lost wildlife habitat, and decreasing agricultural productivity. Between 1990 and 2005, Guatemala lost 17% of its forest cover and, when Hurricane Stan struck in the final year of that period, mudslides on deforested slopes killed 650 people. Yet, fuel and construction requirements for a growing population continue to intensify tree harvesting and increase strain on the forest.

In response, CAUSE Canada has worked with IMDI (Mam Institute for Integrated Development) to establish two large commercial and 20 community-run tree nurseries as part of an integrated Forestry Program. Environmental education in schools and adult education courses, tree-planting days, and management training initiatives have promoted a new, community-oriented forest management ethic. The 10 operational community nurseries together produce 50,000 trees annually. The big nursery in Todos Santos produces 30,000 to 40,000 alder, cyprus, eucalyptus, and white pine trees, and the one in Comitancillo produces and sells 5,000 fruit trees every year!

On Honduras’ Garifuna Coast, trees have been lost to a very different problem. Lethal Yellowing Disease (LYD), a deadly blight for coconut trees, destroyed over 90% of the region’s coconut palms in the early 2000s. The Garifuna people use coconut for all types of food, construction, medicine, weaving, animal feed, as a buffer against hurricanes and tropical storms, and as a tourism draw. Dead coconut stands devastate the Garifuna economy and culture.

CAUSE Canada has established 3 coconut palm nurseries, a hybrid seed producer, 3 community nursery management cooperatives, and a national coconut network to organize monitoring, reforestation, and prevention activities throughout Honduras. In the initial CAUSE Canada project, 20,000 LYD-resistant coconut palms were planted.

In all, CAUSE Canada has planted over 3 million trees in Guatemala and Honduras, plus the constant and ongoing production of tree nurseries.

The trees that CAUSE Canada has been involved in planting will sequester, in their lifetimes, over 12 million tonnes of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere! That’s enough to offset the carbon production of nearly 10,000 Canadians for their entire lives!

CAUSE Canada responded to deforestation in our Central American partner communities because we saw the damage that environmental degradation does to human communities and the rest of the commonwealth of life. We have been rewarded with further insight into the maxim that human justice requires environmental justice. The environment suffers when gross inequality forces the poor into unsustainable activities and permits the wealthy to avoid accountability for their exploitation of common resources. Human society and life suffer when environmental degradation robs us of the ecological services of clean air and water, productive land, a relatively predictable climate, and space in which to observe, unmediated, our own smallness. Human justice and environmental justice or codependent.

Forest renewal in Guatemala and Honduras is great for local communities, but it’s awfully good for the rest of us, too.

1. Do something more fun than driving.

• Walk, bike, canoe, or carpool to work and the store.
• Consider vacationing closer to home. Maybe Canmore. Bring your hiking boots.

2. Eat something (anything!) better than fast food.

• See how low on the food chain you can eat. It's like limbo for lunch.
• Buy (or grow!) food that's in season, organic (or close), and from your bioregion.

3. Use something better than low-grade plastic.

• Look for cloth, metal, glass, or paper packaging instead of plastic.
• Remember that the three R's are a hierarhcy. First reduce, then re-use, then recycle.

4. Unplug everything... something... anything.

• Unplug electronics to avoid burning phantom power for that little red light.
• Check out renewable energy options. Get rebates. Write your politiicians if you can't.

5. Re-think gift-giving.

• Give experiences over things. Going fishing is better than a singing rubber fish.
• Sick of giving unappreciated gifts? Check out CAUSE Canada's Global Gift Catalogue.

6. Offset the emissions you just can't cut.

• Purchase CAUSE Canada carbon offsets.