“Various types of carbon credits are ineffective,” says the Science Based Targets initiative, by CHRIS LANG
SBTi’s synthesis report on the effectiveness of carbon credits is a “bombshell rebuke to offsets”.
“Various types of carbon credits are ineffective,” says the Science Based Targets initiative
SBTi’s synthesis report on the effectiveness of carbon credits is a “bombshell rebuke to offsets”.
JUL 31
In April 2024, the Board of Trustees of the Science Based Targets initiative announced that carbon offsets could be used to meet Scope 3 emissions reduction targets under the SBTi system. The announcement came as a shock to the staff at SBTi who had not even been consulted before the statement was released.
Three days later, SBTi’s Board clarified that no decision had yet been on including carbon offsets. The Board stated that,
In July, a discussion paper with a draft proposal from SBTi about potential changes to Scope 3 will be published which will feed into the standard draft (drafting phase).
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On 2 July 2024, Luiz Amaral announced that he was resigning as CEO of SBTi, for “personal reasons” that “require my full attention at this time, prompting my decision to step down”.
Holger Hoffmann-Riem from the Swiss NGO Go for Impact, who is a member of SBTi’s Technical Advisory Group, told Reuters that,
“For SBTi to regain its credibility, we need a fresh start, with a new board, a new governance structure, and a new CEO.”
No one from SBTi’s Board of Trustees has resigned.
Amaral announced his resignation on the same day that more than 80 civil society organisations, including Oxfam, Amnesty International, Greenpeace, Global Witness, Client Earth, and Carbon Market Watch, called for SBTi to exclude the use of carbon offsets:
SBTi’s review “comprehensively trashes carbon credits”
On 30 July 2024, SBTi published two technical reports that are part of the process of revising SBTi’s Corporate Net Zero Standard.
One of the reports is a synthesis of evidence submitted to SBTi on the effectiveness of carbon offsets.
“The SBTi just published an evidence review that pretty comprehensively trashes carbon credits,” Simon Evans of Carbon Brief commented on LinkedIn.
Joe Romm, Senior Research Fellow at University of Pennsylvania’s Center for Science, Sustainability and the Media, described the synthesis report as “SBTi’s bombshell rebuke to offsets.”
The synthesis report states that, “various types of carbon credits are ineffective in delivering their intended mitigation outcomes”.
The evidence suggests that there could be clear risks to corporate use of carbon credits for the purpose of offsetting. This includes potential unintended effects of hindering the net-zero transformation and/or reducing climate finance.
The report also states that,
The evidence highlights the risk of claims which seek to convey that the purchase and retirement of carbon credits by companies somehow “offsets”, “counterbalances” or “compensates for” unabated value chain emissions.
And it states that,
The vast majority of evidence submissions (84%) argue that treating carbon credits as fungible with other sources, sinks, or reductions of emissions is inadvisable, illogical, or damaging to global mitigation goals, with the other submissions not providing a strong view. Around half of the evidence submissions explicitly support the use of contribution claims over offsetting/compensation/counterbalancing claims.
In a statement, Gilles Dufrasne, lead expert on global carbon markets at Carbon Market Watch and a member of SBTi’s Technical Advisory Group, says that,
“This paper sets the record straight for SBTi, and is proof that SBTi staff are performing high-quality, unbiased work. It is a clear rebuttal of the Board’s April statement, where specific individuals tried to bulldoze through a proposal that did not have any internal support from SBTi staff or advisers.”
“Inherent uncertainty” associated with REDD credits
The synthesis report is particularly critical of REDD offsets (the references cited in this quotation are listed below¹):
One notable finding is that there are papers in this theme with directly opposing findings on the effectiveness of REDD+, based on different methodologies for analysis, with Roopsind et al. (2019), Everland (2023) and Pauly et al. (2023) supporting its effectiveness and several others raising concerns on its effectiveness, e.g. Probst et al. (2023), Haya et al. (2023), West et al. (2020), West et al. (2023); Calyx Global (2023), Berk and Lungungu (2020), and Rainforest Foundation UK (2023). This highlights the complexity in determining the effectiveness of REDD+ specifically. This is perhaps unsurprising, since REDD+ credits are generated based on a counterfactual baseline scenario of future deforestation, meaning there is inherent uncertainty associated with this type of credit.
SBTi will produce a draft standard by the end of 2024. The Financial Times reports Alberto Carrillo Pineda, SBTi’s Chief Technical Officer, as saying that the technical papers will be “codified into proposed requirements, and presented to SBTi’s technical council for review”.
The revised Corporate Net-Zero Standard will not be finalised before late 2025.
“Carbon credits of any sort should not be used to compensate for fossil emissions”
In a statement put out by the Climate Land Ambition and Rights Alliance(CLARA), Doreen Stabinsky, College of the Atlantic, and a member of SBTi’s Technical Council, said that,
“The evaluation of evidence of carbon credit effectiveness reinforces what many academics have been saying for decades: carbon credits of any sort should not be used to compensate for fossil emissions. In the words of the report: treating carbon credits as fungible with other sources, sinks, or reductions of emissions is inadvisable, illogical, or damaging to global mitigation goals. We have all been distracted over the past few years with carbon credit scandal after carbon credit scandal and the market apologists who claim that all will be fine if we just increase the ‘integrity’ of credits. The message of the report is clear: carbon credits are fundamentally incompatible with action in line with the Paris Agreement, no matter how much integrity they have.”
Carbon credits are just another financial boondoggle to transfer wealth and excuse poor stewardship by the fascist public/private partnerships and the marriage of corporations and state (the state being the puppet of the corporatists, Zionists and international bankers).
The use of the climate hoax for control of the masses and to extract more wealth from the 99% (while effectively escaping any further responsibility for further accountability for the profits skimmed by using fictitious constructs that our founding fathers forbade -- ("corporations") is one of the biggest swindles ever given a polite face and a sense of urgency that has been tried in our history. That so many have believed it and are now fighting over a crock passing as some kind of compensatory exchange for paying for their business "sins" as they further enrich themselves at everyone else's expense should be both obvious and dismissed for what it is.