Initiative launched to rank corporate climate claims using carbon offsets
By Susanna Twidale and Shadia Nasralla
LONDON (Reuters) – A session for a worldwide customary to evaluate firms’ claims about progress in direction of inner local weather targets and their use of carbon offset credit launched on Tuesday, searching for to carry transparency to an unregulated market.
Many international firms equivalent to Shell and Easyjet have set web zero emission targets, saying they would want to purchase or generate carbon credit to offset residual greenhouse gases.
Offset credit, primarily based on initiatives for planting bushes or switching to much less polluting fuels, at the moment commerce in an unregulated, voluntary market with many various requirements and approaches.
Some local weather activist teams equivalent to Greenpeace are essential of offsets, saying they paper over a scarcity of motion to realize precise emissions cuts.
The Claims Code of Observe launched by the Voluntary Carbon Markets Integrity Initiative (VCMI), backed by the British authorities, seeks to assist traders set up whether or not claims made by firms utilizing carbon offsets are credible.
“We have to have one thing that gives coherence and consistency throughout company claims round carbon credit score use, along side their decarbonisation,” Mark Kember, VCMI govt director informed Reuters in an interview.
The VCMI, arrange final 12 months, is sponsored by Britain and the philanthropic Kids’s Funding Fund Basis and supported by the United Nations Growth Programme.
The brand new code seeks to carry transparency into the usage of phrases equivalent to web zero, local weather impartial or local weather optimistic.
Underneath the usual, an organization could be awarded Gold, Silver or Bronze, relying on progress in direction of its company local weather targets for a given 12 months, and the usage of offsets to transcend these targets, ideally to web zero carbon as quickly as attainable.
The VCMI builds on benchmarks to evaluate company local weather targets, such because the Science Based mostly Targets Initiative, which says an organization can solely declare to have a reputable web zero plan if it makes use of carbon credit to offset lower than 10% of its emissions.
That is designed to restrict the scope for firms to make use of offsets to say they’ve lower emissions, when in reality they proceed to launch planet-warming gases into the ambiance from their very own operations.
The ultimate model of the usual is predicted to be printed early 2023.
(Reporting By Susanna Twidale and Shadia Nasralla,; Modifying by Tomasz Janowski)
