Key Points

Thanks to more and more businesses publicly making “carbon neutrality” or “net-zero” commitments, the voluntary market for carbon emission offsets is booming both globally and in Germany.

But the many eager and sometimes too gullible consumers of emission offsets are not always buying emission offsets for the right reasons – and they are often falling for creative carbon accounting by spurious climate projects.

Key Excerpts

‘Setting climate targets has not just become a must for governments but also for companies. This has triggered a boom in the voluntary carbon offset market.’

‘…many projects use an external quality standard provider which checks the emission reductions achieved and also issues the credits that the project developer can sell.’

‘“The quality of the certificates is quite hit and miss. And often it is very difficult – even for us researchers – to distinguish between a good and a bad carbon credit,” Lambert Schneider from the Institute for Applied Ecology (Öko-Institut) told CLEW.’

‘…there are stark differences between the vendors and standards in the market: While Climate Action Reserve in California requires that the forest must remain standing for 100 years to be used for compensation, there are others that require a guarantee for five or 10 years only or not at all, Schneider explained.’

‘Improper compensation attempts frequently make headlines.’

‘“We see that a large number of these projects are greenwashing and do not actually reduce CO2,” carbon removal expert Karsten Smid from Greenpeace Germany told CLEW.’

This article was originally published on Clean Energy Wire