This is because of the reductionist myth that all organic matter is fungible. It’s always “well we plant new trees, so what’s the problem?”

This article seems to have a climate contradiction when it comes to "credits" versus "removal".

"carbon credits" are the most common, cheap, questionable credits from verifiers such as Verra and Gold Standard.

"CDR" is "carbon dioxide removal" which actively sucks and stores CO2 from the atmosphere. This is an emerging space pioneered in the private markets by companies such as Stripe, Microsoft and Shopify and the Frontier fund.

This article mentions "CDR credits" (and is on a website "carboncredits.com") and the partner Aspiration is slim on the details on their website.

As far as I can gather, Meta has purchased 7M of traditional, nature (i.e. planting trees) "carbon credits" and the role of Aspiration is to use "satellite imagery", "AI" and measurements to monitor the progress of this growth.

It is worth noting that Meta is also a participant in the Frontier CDR fund that is helping stimulate the negative emissions market.

My two cents on this: I think nature based solutions have an important role to play in restoring ecosystems and sequestering carbon. However I'm skeptical of the need to invest so much in the monitoring & verification of the vegetation growth. It feels this is mostly for companies to feel they are getting something for their money rather than trusting organisations to help nature. Instead it would be a better use to turn these technological monitoring solutions on to finding deforestation and ecological damage to limit that.