Dutch reforestation company Land Life started what has become a 35,000 acre forest fire in Spain earlier this week. From a report: The fire started in Bubierca, a province of Zaragoza, the capital of autonomous community Aragon, when a Land Life contractor planting trees accidentally set off sparks that ignited nearby plant life. “The fire started while one of our contractors was using a retro-spider excavator to prepare the soil to plant trees later this winter,” Land Life said in a statement on Thursday. “The operators alerted the emergency services. The emergency teams are working non-stop to control the fire and have fortunately established the fire perimeter. Nonetheless, we are devastated by the latest estimate that the damage will be around 14,000 hectares, or roughly 35,000 acres.”

“While a contractor was working on forest restoration in the area, a spark from one of the excavators started the fire,” the company wrote in an earlier press release. Land Life is a carbon offsetting firm, which means that it plants trees to, in theory, make up for the carbon emissions of polluting industries. It’s not clear how many acres Land Life has actually planted trees in — one blog post suggested the company aimed to plant around 20,000 acres between 2020-2021. This forest fire has not likely wiped out the lion’s share of Land Life’s work, but it is also not the first forest fire caused by Land Life — on June 20, it sparked another inferno that wiped out 20 hectares.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – Corporate Carbon Offset Company Accidentally Starts Devastating Wildfire