A Bloomberg investigation has found that a company that purportedly makes money from planting trees to combat climate change has been counting already-existing forests as the product of its efforts and reaping the green financial incentives in the process. The firm, GreenTrees, pays landowners to turn croplands into forests, then measures the climate  impact of the new trees and converts it to carbon offsets, which it then sells to large corporations such as Disney, United Airlines and Royal Dutch Shell.

Bloomberg, based on interviews with 17 landowners as well as hundreds of pages of contracts and project documents, says that more often than not this company is claiming trees that are either already planted or were set to be planted soon anyway in its calculations, meaning that those carbon offsets that it's selling are basically doing nothing to mitigate climate change. Many of the landowners interviewed said they were approached by the company years after they'd planted their trees, sometimes before they even knew what a carbon offset was.

The company said that it's not doing anything wrong because the landowners attest that the prospect of future carbon revenues had influenced their decisions to plant trees (despite many owners saying otherwise), and so therefore the intent to capture carbon is clearly articulated. It has not communicated how this reasoning plays into the fact that, because these are not new trees, they do not really represent new carbon being captured, which is the whole point of an offset and what companies that buy them are expecting.

The incident drives home an issue in sustainability reporting that has gotten increased attention, namely the lack of mandatory attestation, as in in financial accounting. While many companies do get third-party attestation for their reporting, most are limited-scope engagements that mostly consist of nonspecific conclusions. In contrast, the financial reporting world (while having flaws of its own), not only has a mandatory attestation requirement, but also has uniform standards and principles that bind all public companies, as well as internal control systems that provide an initial check.