Zunyi in Southwest China's Guizhou province issued the first tea garden carbon sink ticket on Dec 26. A carbon sink ticket certifies the carbon emission reduction of a tea garden and can be traded, pledged or offset.

A carbon sink is anything that absorbs more carbon dioxide from the atmosphere than it releases. Forests offer a net carbon sink as they take in more carbon than they emit – which has a commercial value that is traded on a specialist exchange.

The ticket issued by the Meitan bureau of forestry certified 6,043.75-metric-tons-worth of carbon dioxide emissions which were offset by 533.63 hectares of tea gardens.

Meitan county boasts an excellent natural environment and promotes carbon neutrality and peak carbon emissions via its tea industry. The county has 4,000 hectares of tea gardens and has ranked first among China's top 100 counties in terms of the tea industry over the last three years.

Meitan has drafted trial management rules and work processes for tea garden carbon sink tickets, and will promote the tickets across the county.

In recent years, Meitan has been devoted to green development and accelerated the integration of tea processing, agriculture and rural tourism to increase farmers' incomes.