Last March, BRINK spoke to Kate Dooley, an expert in carbon offsets, who argued that they were not contributing to the net zero goal.
Land-based offsets, i.e., sequestering carbon into forests and soils, don’t compensate for emissions from fossil fuel in terms of reducing long-term temperature increase.
At the same time, we do need land-based removals in order to remove carbon-dioxide from the atmosphere.
That means that if one entity is above its cap, it buys credits from another one that’s under the cap.
Offsetting is usually conducted via trading, but it doesn’t have to be; you could offset without trading, but usually it’s an extension of a carbon trading scheme.
In principle, carbon trading can lead to robust, verifiable emission reductions at greater efficiency and lower cost , but in reality, carbon trading is often beset by verification and transparency issues.
DOOLEY: There have been huge advances in the last few decades.
But despite these advances, land remains the most uncertain component of the carbon cycle.
That’s because land — forests and soils — are emitting and sequestering carbon all the time on a daily, monthly, yearly basis, which makes it difficult to measure.
And so the resilience of the carbon stored in a tree’s biomass, and whether it is lost due to climate change, drought, pests, wildfires, etc., depends on the overall health of the ecosystem.
So measuring the biomass in an individual tree can be used to calculate carbon content, but it doesn’t tell you anything about ecosystem health.
DOOLEY: Within a single sector, you don’t have the same problem of offsetting terrestrial carbon for fossil carbon.
But you don’t have that problem if you are offsetting biogenic carbon because temporarily it’s equivalent.
DOOLEY: I am not familiar with current carbon offsetting or removal projects, but I have been going through countries’ NDCs, their 2030 climate plans and looking at what they pledge to do in terms of land-use.
These kinds of activities are very beneficial for ecosystems, as improving the ecosystem health of these areas in turn improves agricultural productivity.
While many countries will count that toward a net zero pledge, meaning they are effectively offsetting these actions against fossil fuel emissions, a lot of these countries don’t have significant emissions from fossil fuels.
The ultimate measure of whether any kind of climate action is effective is its contribution to limiting temperature increase over the long-term .
Kate has policy expertise on forest governance, climate change and carbon accounting and has almost two decades experience advising government and nongovernment organizations.