We work with 3rd party verifiers and standards like the Gold Standard and the Verified Carbon Standard(VCS) to ensure the offsets you are investing in are verified, legal, and sustainable.
In addition to this, we rigorously reviews all of the projects in our portfolios and incorporates guidance from 3rd party experts to provide offsets that result in real climate impact.
Here are all the different components of the vetting process we employ to ensure the projects we support are high quality:
Criteria | Description |
Additionality | Net new carbon must be removed, rather than 'business as usual'. |
Accurate quantification | For a carbon offset to be real, it is essential that the emission reductions it represents be quantified accurately. |
Auditing | The project must be tested before and during it's progress to ensure credibility. |
Ownership | Clear ownerships must be established for the greenhouse gas reductions that the credit represents. |
Permanence | The climate benefit from the project must be durable, for us we define "permanent" as 1000 years. |
No Leakage | Greenhouse gas reduction in one region cannot cause an increase in emissions somewhere else. |
Timing | Credits must represent removals that are actively happening, not removals that will happen in the future. |
Sustainability | At a minimum, carbon offset projects should comply with all relevant social and environmental regulations. |
How do credits go wrong?
Offsets have had a rather rocky journey from their initial creation, with some very high profile cases of projects not delivering on their promises.
Here are some of the issues that can arise:
Quantification
Avoided emissions require an accurate baseline in order to quantify the impact of project. But there are challenges establishing this baseline and project managers are incentivised to inflate the baseline to optimize their project's credit creation. This is why we look at removals instead as they are more easily quantified objectively.
Leakages
Unintended impacts that come from carbon projects, i.e. protecting one area may increase the rates of deforestation elsewhere
Additionality
Projects may have occurred without the funding from the carbon credits so investment in these credits didn't actually create climate action.
Despite their controversies there is a lot of benefits that supporting a true high quailty project can have.
You can read more about the risks here.