Building an Informed Carbon Credit Community
If you’re using OffsetC, you’re not just purchasing carbon credits. You’re joining a community that needs to trust that carbon credits provide meaningful climate action. To counter misinformation, trite sound bites, and bland explanations, we are opening ourselves to a deeper dive into our methodology and the projects your purchases support. Please reach out with feedback and questions. Let’s make our future communications a conversation – not a lecture!
This post is the first in a series that discusses how OffsetC evaluates carbon projects and how we view the carbon market.
Our climate actions must focus on behavioral changes that reduce consumption and waste. For activities that directly and unavoidably produce carbon emissions, like driving a gasoline-powered car, carbon offsetting is also a crucial part of the solution.
Offsets address emissions here and now. They also fund the development of emerging carbon removal technologies that will play an essential role in future solutions to the climate crisis. This series will bolster your confidence in the climate actions you’re taking through OffsetC – and hopefully provides you with the information to convince friends and family to join our crusade.
Trust is the foundation
Like any product you buy, carbon credits have attributes that allow you to assess their ‘quality.’ Those attributes indicate how effective credits will be in achieving their intended purpose.
What we mean by ‘quality’ and who determines whether a project is high-quality are central questions for anyone using carbon credits to reduce their carbon footprint. Ultimately, the answers boil down to trust:
Trust that a project can and will meet its carbon reduction targets
Trust in the specific methods and technologies employed by a project
Trust that project reporting and monitoring are accurate
Trust that funds are well spent in service of climate impact
Without that trust, from purchasers like you who fund these activities, there is no carbon marketplace. We want to build that trust by radical transparency with the OffsetC community.
Arming You with Knowledge
Assessing a carbon project’s quality and impact can get quite technical. It requires a deeper dive than this series of posts provides. Our goal here is to acquaint you with basic concepts and lingo, as well as our stance on relevant criteria and issues. With that beginning knowledge, you can dive as deep into the details as you like on our Projects page.
We’ll start by focusing on three essential attributes we use to assess quality of the credits we purchase on your behalf:
Durability or Permanence refers to how long a project’s carbon removal or avoidance lasts—the longer the better.
Additionality measures whether carbon credits are necessary for a project to reach its reduction targets—ensuring your money is well spent.
Verifiability assesses how well a project is documented, vetted, and tracked over time to ensure it reaches its carbon reduction goals.
To gain insight into carbon credit attributes and how we use them to select projects, check out the next post and join us on our carbon crusade.
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Our Understanding Carbon Offsets Series:
Part 1: Building an Informed Carbon Credit Community
Part 4: Trust, but Verify
Part 5: Beyond Carbon: Do Good, Not Harm
