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In December of 2006, Clean Air - Cool Planet released the report Consumer’s Guide to Retail Carbon Offset Providers. This 40-page report was commissioned by CA-CP to “help the corporations, campuses, and communities we work with understand the offsets market more fully,” according to Adam Markham, executive director.
“We also hoped it would serve as a catalyst for change in the market, where clearly more transparency is needed in order for people to understand what they are purchasing and the quality of the product.”
The report, done by Trexler Climate + Energy Services of Portland, Oregon, examined 30 offset providers and rated them on seven weighted criteria. The providers were then scored and ranked in two tiers.
“This is a rapidly developing and changing market,” Markham notes, “and we wanted simply to give potential buyers a feeling for which providers perform best against these consumer-oriented criteria at this moment.
“We recognized that we could not produce a definitive ranking – nor did we want to. Our best hope is that people will now have the tools – the criteria and the questions recommended in the report – to do their own evaluation of providers over time.”
The report was sponsored by CA-CP partners Interface, ClifBar, and Stonyfield Farm.
Of the 30 offset providers studied, the following ranked in the top tier:
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- AgCert/DrivingGreen™ (Ireland)
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- CarbonNeutral Company (UK)
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- Sustainable Travel/ MyClimate™
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An Introduction to Offset Quality
A perfect offset project would be characterized by specific characteristics:
- Additionality: It would be easy to see the connection between the demand created by carbon offset
markets and the emissions reductions being sold as offsets. The connection can be a financial one, e.g.
where offset revenues clearly make a project happen that otherwise would not have happened, or it can be
more subtle, where the offset market or offset funding makes it possible to overcome other barriers to a
project.
- Baseline Determination: Once additionality is confirmed, a credible approach would have been used to
create an emissions baseline for the project, namely the emissions that would have occurred in the
absence of the project.
- Benefit Quantification: The quantification of the GHG emissions reductions (or sequestration) resulting
from an offset project (relative to baseline emissions) would reflect key potential uncertainties, as well as
the potential for leakage (including the possibility that GHG emissions increase elsewhere as a result of
the project).
- Permanence: The offsets would not be subject to potential reversal in the future (as can occur with
carbon sequestration projects where the trees might die by fire or pest infestation).
- Ownership: Ownership of the reductions would be clear, making it less likely that the same offsets might
be claimed and sold multiple times. This is much easier with direct reductions (e.g., on-site reductions)
than with indirect ones (e.g., off-site reductions, as with renewable energy generation displacing
emissions at a power plant somewhere else).
- Monitoring and Verification: The offset project would be monitored and its offsets verified over time.
- Registration: The offsets would be registered to provide a paper trail and to reduce the possibility that the
same offsets might be sold multiple times.
Several variables that don’t influence an offset project’s technical quality, but which are commonly used to
characterize offset projects, include:
- Offset cost: It is important to recognize that there is no necessary correlation between cost to generate and
offset, and offset quality.
- Ancillary environmental benefits: Ancillary environmental and other benefits are desirable, but shouldn’t
substitute for technical quality as characterized above.
- Offset timing: Offsets may be sold on an “as you go” basis or may be sold in advance of the actual offset’s
creation. The advance sale of offsets creates certain project performance risks relating to whether the
offsets will ultimately be generated, but can be key to the pursuit of “additional” offset projects.
(The material above is excerpted from "A Consumer's Guide to Retail Carbon Offsets" (Box 3, p.3) and as such is subject to full copyright protection.)
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