The use of offsets is one of the most controversial aspects within the concept of net zero. To contribute to the debate and to build a shared understanding of key issues, this is the second of two webinars on offsets intended for financial institutions with net-zero ambitions.
Offsetting allows companies to meet their emissions targets by purchasing certificates that supposedly represent avoided emissions or removals of GHGs from the atmosphere. Unfortunately, more than two decades of experience with both regulated and voluntary offset schemes shows that the simple concept behind offsetting is extremely difficult to implement in practice.
In a previous webinar, we discussed the lessons learned from 20 years of offset experience. We notably covered the reasons why despite repeated efforts to find solutions, the quality challenges of the Kyoto Protocol Clean Development Mechanism, California’s offset program, and the voluntary offset market, remain largely unresolved.
In this second webinar, we focused on the future of offsetting. We discussed among other topics current financial sector positions on using offsets; the implications of the work of the Integrity Council for the Voluntary Carbon Market (the successor initiative to the Task Force on Scaling Voluntary Carbon Markets); and explained the key distinctions in terms of environmental integrity between different types of offsets and the implications of this for the use of offsets within net zero targets.
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