So, a company can purchase a carbon credit that offsets a tonne of their CO2 emissions, because those emissions have been reduced elsewhere.
“The first one is based on avoided emissions,” explains Peter Christoff, a senior research fellow with Melbourne Climate Futures at Melbourne University.
For example, speaking with the ABC, Macintosh expressed concerns that most of the forest regeneration projects under the Australian ERF scheme are being planted in arid regions of Australia, where ecologists believe the trees are actually unviable in the long-term.
So the system of calculating actual emissions reduced is hazy, at best.
“The large projects in the Australian scheme are typically ones where landholders say we are not clearing this piece of land, and we would otherwise clear this piece of land,” Jotzo explains.
“So, the assumption here is that if it had not been for the project, those landholders would have cleared the land.
In this case, the aggregate impact on emissions is zero, because the ‘offset’ carbon emissions have instead been released elsewhere.
“I have really serious concerns about the whole idea of offsetting,” says Christoff.
Because Australia is an arid continent with increasing rates of bushfires, we can’t be confident that vegetation – even long-lived trees – will persist into the future.
“The problem is the word offset,” Borevtiz says.
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