More than 80 civil society organisations (CSOs), including Amnesty International, Greenpeace, Oxfam and others, are urging corporate climate standards bodies to exclude carbon offsets from net-zero targets. They argue that purchasing carbon credits to meet climate goals undermines real-world emissions reductions.
The statement signed by the CSOs argues that allowing countries and companies to meet climate commitments through the use of carbon credits is “likely to slow down global emission reductions while failing to provide anything like the scale of funds needed in the Global South [to tackle and adapt to climate change], and reducing pressure to develop large-scale mechanisms such as ‘polluter pays’ fees on emission-intensive sectors.”
The call comes amid a heated debate, recently intensified by the Science Based Targets Initiative (SBTI) proposals allowing more extensive use of carbon credits for corporate net zero supply chain targets.
The signatories of the latest statement demand “scientific, ambitious, equitable, robust, credible and transparent rules around carbon accounting and corporate climate target setting” and have called for voluntary and regulatory frameworks to be developed as part of climate transition planning to exclude offsetting.
The joint statement also argued that emissions-intensive companies had a responsibility to invest in carbon-related projects beyond their direct sphere of influence, but noted that voluntary carbon markets “risked disincentivising the significant investments needed to ensure profound changes to corporate value chains and economic systems”.
The statement reads, “Companies can make a positive impact by funding carbon-related projects beyond their own value chain. Such financial contributions can be a way for companies to acknowledge their broader and historic responsibility for climate change, but they neither reduce the necessary investments to abate emissions from their own operations nor do they absolve them from accountability to clean up and pay for the impacts of their pollution.”
The statement claims that carbon credits send a “misleading signal about the efforts required to pursue climate action and undermine carbon prices by providing a false sense of the existence of ultra-cheap abatement options”.