Are carbon rating agencies the key to avoiding greenwashing?

With the European Union reintroducing carbon credits as a tool for industries and businesses to offset their carbon dioxide emissions, carbon rating agencies are ready to help evaluate whether the …

Are Carbon Offsets Fixable?

This article provides a systematic review of the literature on carbon offsets. A growing number of studies have found that the most widely used offset programs continue to greatly overestimate their probable climate impact often by a factor of five to ten or more. Credit quality has remained a problem since the inception of carbon credits, despite repeated efforts to address the core challenges of additionality, leakage, double counting, environmental injustice, verification, and permanence. Combined, these issues have led many to conclude that overcrediting in carbon offsets is an intractable problem. These challenges helped stall the rapid growth in the voluntary carbon market (VCM) earlier this decade. They warrant renewed focus in the wake of COP29, where 200 nations significantly advanced the effort begun with the Paris Agreement to create the rules governing a global compliance market for carbon credits. But COP29 did not substantially address the quality problem, creating the risk the Paris compliance market will be rife with overcrediting and other problems—and that the VCM could undermine the Paris market. We recommend that all stakeholders begin focusing on high-integrity, durable carbon dioxide removal and storage, while recognizing that the recent literature has raised the question of whether durable means 100 years, 1,000 years, or longer. Ultimately, we find that many of the most popular offset project types feature intractable quality problems. We should focus on creating rules to find and fund the relatively few types of high-quality projects while employing alternative finance and strategies such as contribution claims for the critical projects in conservation, renewable energy, and sustainable development.

Study shows limits of planting trees to offset burning of fossil fuels

Planting trees can help save the planet, right? A new study finds that to offset all the planet-warming carbon emissions from fossil fuel reserves, trees would have to entirely cover an area the size of North and Central America combined. Authors of the study published Thursday in study in the journal Communications Earth & Environment say this doesn’t mean tree planting can’t be part of the climate solution, but it does show that it’s not simply a “magic eraser” businesses can use to compensate for contributing to global warming. The researchers hope the study will encourage policymakers not to let corporations off the hook when they pledge to offset their actions with trees.

Bluesky