Despite belonging to the highly polluting fossil fuel sector, major oil and gas companies are not only among the largest buyers of carbon credits, they are also heavily invested in seeking to shape the voluntary carbon market. This report zooms in this outsized role. It focuses on how oil supermajors employ greenwashing strategies, including offsetting their emissions and using carbon credits to give the illusion of meaningful progress towards reaching their climate targets. Driven by a desire to safeguard the supply of cheap and low-quality carbon credits, some fossil fuel companies have also been engaging with policy and governance processes through both formal and informal channels.
Oil and gas interests pollute the carbon crediting rulebook and invest heavily in a marketplace flush with low-quality carbon credits. A new Carbon Market Watch report demonstrates how some of the world’s biggest fossil fuel companies use their oversized leverage to influence major decision-making bodies in the voluntary carbon market.
Carbon Market Watch filed this complaint with the Integrity Council for Voluntary Carbon Market (ICVCM) to flag that Verra’s “review” of Human Rights Watch’s grievance related to Cambodia’s Southern Cardamom REDD+ project does not comply with the ICVCM Assessment Framework provisions on grievance mechanisms.
The Voluntary Carbon Market Integrity initiative’s latest guidance on the use of carbon credits by companies undermines VCMI’s stated mission of combating greenwashing and setting out a framework for making valid climate claims. Last year, VCMI published its long anticipated Claims Code of Practice, which provides guidance for companies on how to use carbon credits …
Read more “VCMI’s new framework needlessly endangers its credibility”
A new report by Carbon Market Watch has raised concerns over a lack of transparency and accountability within the unregulated voluntary carbon market caused by the unavailability of important project documents from the four biggest carbon crediting standards.
This analysis assesses the public availability of project documentation across the four main voluntary carbon market registries: Verified Carbon Standard (VCS), Gold Standard (GS), American Carbon Registry (ACR), and the Climate Action Reserve (CAR). These standards were selected as they collectively issue the majority of the world’s (voluntary market) carbon credits.
The Integrity Council for the Voluntary Carbon Market has just released a set of new rules which seek to boost the quality of carbon credits for offsetting but ignore other issues with the market. While this is an improvement on current practices, the problematic concept of offsetting itself must be abandoned. As part of its …
Read more “Integrity Council’s new carbon market rules offer improvements but don’t close all loopholes”
Voluntary carbon market standards promising tonne-for-tonne compensation and exact measurement of impact are attempting to square the circle, argues Gilles Dufrasne. One solution is to drop offsetting claims and offer credits as financial contributions to climate action. Last week marked the closing of the public consultation on quality criteria for carbon credits by a new …
Read more “Scale vs integrity: The impossibility of developing a large market of high quality carbon offsets”
