Article 6 of the 2015 Paris Agreement lays the foundation for voluntary carbon markets which ‘deliver an overall mitigation in global emissions’.
Even though the diverse and divided world in which we live makes horsetrading a diplomatic imperative at United Nations negotiations, the climate cannot be cheated.
By relying on international carbon offsets instead of reducing their own emissions, heavy industry made windfall profits of up to €3 billion in the space of a decade through the European Union’s emissions-trading system.
These discredited low-quality credits, which were of negligible environmental value and were too cheap to discourage pollution, have no place under the Paris Agreement, especially if it is to keep the 1.5C ceiling for global heating above pre-industrial levels alive.
The Brexit debacle popularised the term ‘cakeism’.
This typically occurs when a buyer of offsets, such as a country or company, claims to have lowered their pollution through carbon credits, despite the associated emission reductions having already been counted by the country where they occurred.
Carbon offsetting has been founded on the zero-sum principle that a tonne of emissions is theoretically balanced against a tonne of greenhouse gases absorbed or removed from, or not emitted to, the atmosphere.
This massive discrepancy in timescale is particularly alarming when it comes to offsetting claims made by fossil-fuel companies.
But the language needs to be strengthened and article 6 needs to provide a framework for involving local communities in project design, as well as establishing an independent mechanism for dealing with grievances.
They provide a comparative overview of the different schemes implemented in the context of the crisis, considering their design as well as their size in terms of expenditure, and map adjustments made to them in the course of the crisis.
It pinpoints issues that have surfaced over the course of the pandemic, such as increased job insecurity due to the threat of job loss, decline in mental wellbeing, erosion of recent gains in gender equality, fall in trust vis-à-vis institutions, deterioration of work–life balance and growth of vaccine hesitancy.
After more than a year of the pandemic, we are in a crucial political moment: policy decisions made now will drive reforms and sustainable growth in the years to come.
Against that background, this paper formulates a social Europe thus: social minimum standards plus a reconfiguration of the internal market and economic and monetary union in a manner compatible with the pillars of the European social model.