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”