Offsetting gets a bad rap, but if done properly is an essential part of the fight against climate change, argues Jane Burston
Carbon offsetting is an unusual business to be in. The idea has emission reductions at its core but mention it in environmental circles and you’re guaranteed to produce sniffing disparagement in at least a quarter of your listeners.
The uninitiated may well wonder why - what’s so off-mark with this specific act of environmentalism that causes a reaction usually reserved for oil companies and people who own patio heaters?
There are two major gripes.
The first is that carbon offsets are deemed to be the indulgences of the twenty first century – a ruse designed to make us feel better about our high-carbon activities but do nothing to change them.
I’m not sure this one stacks up anymore. Maybe in the past there were organisations who duped the public by claiming they were carbon neutral when in fact all they had done was offset, and no effort had been spent on reducing emissions.
The Advertising Standards Agency and the media has put paid to that, and now businesses are more worried than ever about making green claims that might be disputed.
To a large extent though, this was never the real problem. The vast majority of people who spend money on carbon offsets care about climate change. If they didn’t care it’s unlikely they would be prepared to accept a financial cost for their carbon footprint.
The same goes for organisations. Yes, being carbon neutral helps with marketing a particular brand or product, but only if you can use it to prove you actually care i.e. only if it’s coupled with a lot of effort to reduce the organisation’s carbon footprint in the first place.
Occasionally you may come across a nuanced version of this gripe, which says it’s all well and good taking responsibility for our unavoidable emissions (or mitigating our guilt, if that’s the way you see it) by investing in emissions reductions in developing countries, but in order to really tackle climate change we need to reduce developed world emissions – fast.
Unless we tackle our own high per capita emissions we’re never going to peak emissions in time to avoid catastrophic climate change. Keeping India and China down to a few tonnes per person isn’t going to solve the problem.
It’s a good point.
The second, and more common, complaint is that carbon offsets are a license for fraudsters to make money from well-intentioned people who want to do their bit to save the planet.
Over the past few years a steady stream of media reports and academic research has uncovered quite serious failings in the process of allowing developing-country projects to generate and sell carbon credits.
Some projects claim social benefits whilst actually harming the communities they’re based in; others were happening already and are now using offsets to generate extra profit rather than make additional emissions reductions.
Little of the money goes to sustainable development - Carbon Retirement’s own research, validated by the UN Environment Programme and published by the BBC, shows that the process is so complex that only 28p in every £1 spent on offsetting is actually spent on the project the buyer intended the money to fund.
The rest gets lost along the way to brokers, lawyers, consultants and other intermediaries involved in the supply chain.
Worse, the most recent furore is an accusation from NGOs that offsetting has incentivised an increase in pollution – from harmful HFC gases – a type of project that has generated around half of all UN approved carbon offsets sold to date.
Consequently it’s hard, if not impossible, for buyers to trust that their money will make a positive difference.
Carbon offsetting is sometimes presented as a distraction. But as we realise the scale of the challenge ahead, offsetting is likely to prove vital as a tool for driving emission reductions where direct changes in behaviour are not possible.
We should take responsibility not just for investing in offsets but for ensuring the approach is a robust one.
Jane Burston is co-founder of Carbon Retirement, a firm which buys ‘permits to pollute’ directly from the European Emission Trading Scheme and then permanently removes them from the scheme. www.carbonretirement.com