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From Climate & Capitalism
Summary
- Offsetting greenhouse gas emissions with carbon credits undermines actual emission reductions and can delay climate action.
- Carbon offsetting programs have significant quality issues, lack credibility, and can lead to further harm to the environment and communities.
- The use of carbon credits as offsets can send misleading signals about the efforts needed for climate action and distract from the necessary investments for reducing emissions.
In the past few months, we have seen a growing push, notably with the public statement of the SBTi Board of Trustees, to allow companies and countries to use carbon credits to offset their emissions. This reflects a bigger trend² of bending carbon accounting rules, undermining actual emissions reductions.
Climate targets must focus primarily on reduction of greenhouse gas emissions within companies’ and countries’ own boundaries, including the phasing out of fossil fuel production, transport, sale and use. An urgent scale-up of financial support from both public and private actors is needed for this. But allowing companies and countries to meet climate commitments with carbon credits is likely to slow down global emission reductions while failing to provide anything like the scale of funds needed in the Global South, and reducing pressure to develop large-scale mechanisms such as “polluter pays” fees on emission-intensive sectors.
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We call for scientific, ambitious, equitable, robust, credible and transparent rules around carbon accounting and corporate climate target setting. Voluntary and regulatory frameworks on climate transition planning must exclude offsetting.
Click below to see the full statement, and all the signatories.
Read the full post at Climate & Capitalism.
