Profile:  Sara Gipton

Aren’t we lucky that trees don’t understand politics?  The trees we plant now will grow, taking more carbon from the atmosphere sooner, says Greenfleet’s CEO Sara Gipton. But the problem for Australian carbon offset providers like Greenfleet is that the Government’s ambitious, overarching and repeatedly delayed CPRS has created confusion among those most committed to action on climate change – participants in the voluntary carbon market. Besides Government has committed to dispose of the very workable Greenhouse Friendly programme without having an alternative in place.

Here’s the word from Sara Gipton, CEO of  Greenfleet:

Aren’t we lucky that trees don’t understand politics?  The trees we plant now will grow, taking more carbon from the atmosphere sooner.

Our climate doesn’t understand politics either.  Further delay on taking action means we will have to take greater action later.  The CPRS is a political compromise, but it is better than nothing.  In the meantime, Greenfleet will continue to plant biodiverse forests on behalf of our supporters.

Greenfleet was the first not-for-profit organisation to have forestry offset methodology approved under the Federal Government’s Greenhouse Friendly initiative. Its forestry methods, administrative processes and legal agreements have all been independently scrutinised to ensure they meet appropriate standards.  

Sara Gipton became CEO of Greenfleet in early 2007 after moving to the environmental sector in 2005.  Sara joined Greenfleet after holding senior financial roles at the Victorian Workcover Authority and prior to that worked in Ernst & Young’s Audit and Consulting Divisions for more than 12 years. Sara is a Chartered Accountant, with an Honours degree in Science and a Masters of Social Science focused on environmental management and planning.

Sara is Board member of the Voluntary Carbon Market Association, member of RMIT School of Social Science Environment Advisory Committee, and member of the Committee of Melbourne Boston Sister City Committee, as well as a member of other community organisations.

Ruth Williams had this article in The Age (26 January 2010):

WHEN Melbourne-based operation Greenfleet won the right to display the Federal Government’s Greenhouse Friendly logo in early 2008, the non-profit tree-planting organisation was personally congratulated by Climate Change Minister Penny Wong.

”Greenfleet’s biodiversity forest projects will not only result in a reduction of greenhouse gases, they will also provide valuable habitat for native fauna and assist in the regeneration of the Australian landscape,” Wong said at the time.

Greenfleet was, in fact, the first non-profit organisation to achieve Greenhouse Friendly accreditation as an ”approved abatement provider” – a title it won after a long, expensive and exhaustive process, says chief executive Sara Gipton. But for an operation trading in Australia’s fledgling voluntary carbon offsets market, one that relies on its reputation to convince supporters to buy its offsets, the credibility bestowed by Federal Government accreditation was worth every cent.

But slightly more than a year after Greenfleet was accredited, Wong announced that Greenhouse Friendly would be dumped, along with its logo of a grinning green pointy-roofed house. It would be superseded by the Government’s centrepiece green policy, the carbon pollution reduction scheme (CPRS), and replaced by a new national carbon offset standard – complete with a new, yet to be unveiled, logo.

It’s meant that Greenfleet’s return on its substantial investment in Greenhouse Friendly – the product of a year’s work – is much less than it should have been. But that’s not its only problem.

Under the Government’s current timetable, Greenhouse Friendly will cease to exist on June 30, at which point the carbon offset standard, which was released with little fanfare at the start of December, will come into force. The standard is designed to complement the CPRS, but there is substantial uncertainty about whether the CPRS will be passed by June 30.

No CPRS means no carbon offset standard and no Greenhouse Friendly – a situation that creates a huge regulatory vacuum for Greenfleet and its peers.

Meanwhile, CPRS regulations governing forestry are yet to be released, and are unlikely to be until after the CPRS legislation is put before the Senate next week.

So when Greenhouse Friendly ceases to be, so will any national, Government-backed method of accrediting forestry carbon offsets.

”At the moment we have massive regulatory uncertainty,” Gipton says. ”If the legislation doesn’t pass and Greenhouse Friendly is still shut down on the 30th of June, we have a problem because we don’t have a standard which we can tell our supporters, with certainty,that we operate to. It’s very important that we have that – people want to be assured that we are operating credibly.”

But the regulatory tangle doesn’t end there. Greenfleet offsets emissions with forestry, a method covered by the Kyoto Protocol. This is a crucial point, because were Greenfleet to do nothing, its forestry projects would be lumped in as counting towards Australia’s overall emission reduction target – its so-called ”cap”.

This means there would be less incentive for Greenfleet’s supporters to offset their emissions, because the offsets generated would not be ”additional” to the emission cuts Australia has already committed to. In effect, they would simply be facilitating the pollution of big emitters.

The way around this situation is for Greenfleet to participate, or ”opt in”, to the CPRS and ”retire” its permits on a yet-to-be-established national registry, so they can’t be counted towards the national target and can be considered truly additional. This is Greenfleet’s plan. Unfortunately, however, Greenfleet can’t agree to participate in something that doesn’t yet exist.

Greenfleet’s conundrum is one example of how the Government’s ambitious, overarching and repeatedly delayed CPRS has created confusion among those most committed to action on climate change – participants in the voluntary carbon market.

Caroline Bayliss, director of RMIT’s Global Sustainability Institute, is baffled as to why the Government set a firm date for the demise of Greenhouse Friendly when uncertainty surrounded its replacement. She says the forestry offset operators are now in an difficult position. ”What happens in terms of the whole market absent a CPRS is really a conundrum, especially when it comes to some offset types like forestry,” she says.

Dr Iain MacGill, from the University of NSW’s Centre for Energy and Environmental Markets, says the Government has failed to manage ”policy risk”.

”Even if you believe that you’ve found a single, all unifying policy (in the CPRS), if climate change is the critically important issue the Government keeps telling us it is, you don’t make progress hostage to the passage of this single piece of legislation,” he said. ”Making other policies hostage to the CPRS puts climate policy progress at risk; an issue that we’ve already seen with the expanded renewable energy target. We need a wide range of policies in place in case the CPRS doesn’t get passed or fails to deliver the changes required.”

Source: www.theage.com.au

For more on Greenfleet, visit the website and see its February e-news.  Find out how new car fuel efficiency averages in Australia compare to the rest of the world, plus read about trials of electric and solar vehicles.  

Source: www.greenfleet.com.au