Sanity check on carbon offsetting
27 11 2007Lunch with Martin Wright, Editor at Large of Green Futures magazine; the Bible of sustainability for what Martin says has become a very broad church of readers. Martin has recently revamped the mag and it looks great. I’ve been increasingly worried about carbon offsets recently (not least because I’m shopping around for a provider for Weber Shandwick), and have felt some of the bad press they’ve had must surely be unjustified. My own former client Climate Care, has come in for a lot of flak in the papers this year, and The Times did a major hatchet job on one of their projects in India. To my relief, Martin restored my faith in carbon offsetting, and is not just a fan of Climate Care but also the India project in particular, which he has visited and written about. It’s the first time I’ve heard an environmentalist evangelise about offsetting for a long time, and it was a breath of fresh air frankly.
Now we need to restore the reputation of forest based offsets, which have also been the subject of unfair criticism, on the basis that you can’t guarantee the forest will still be there in 30 years time. Really? What is the Forest Stewardship Council for then? If you take certified forests, of course you can provide that guarantee, that’s what certification is for. Some NGOs are difficult beasts. 10 years ago they called for biofuel. Now biofuels are the enemy. They called for carbon offsetting, then trashed them as a licence to pollute. I’m exaggerating a bit of course, but a bit of consistency would help businesses really plan for the future. The worst thing is when environmental groups persuade businesses to do something and then decide it wasn’t as brilliant an idea as they first thought and start campaigning against companies for doing what they campaigned for in the first place. Eventually business will stop listening.
Good to see my enthusiasm for the best kind of offsets rubbed off on Brendan. But just to balance my enthusiasm a bit, I should say that I agree with the ‘offset-sceptics’ that there is a lot that’s wrong with the way many such schemes have been constructed and sold in the past. Many have serious doubts against them in terms of their rigour and their ‘additionality’ (ie, whether they would have happened anyway, without the offset funding). And I have a lot of sympathy with those who decry offsets as offering a ‘get out of jail free’ card to the lazy polluter.
A responsible approach is first to reduce your energy use as much as possible; then make sure you source as much as possible from renewable sources; and only then to use offsets to address your ‘unavoidable’ emissions.
But unless you’re going to travel everywhere by bicycle or electric vehicle, never step on a plane and never sit in the warm glow of gas central heating, then you’re always going to be responsible for at least some carbon emissions. Then you have a choice. You can either shrug your shoulders and do nothing - or you can invest in schemes which, like the best run by Climate Care and responsible providers, have been shown both to reduce emissions AND tackle poverty in developing countries. Schemes that do that can be an invaluable source of money for hard-to-fund small-scale projects which make a huge difference to the quality of life of some of the world’s poorest, most vulnerable people. And critics who decry all offsets on principle should pause to consider the effect that their opinions may have on those who would otherwise be willing to contribute to those projects.
So by all means be sceptical about offsets as some kind of easy, dream solution to climate change (they’re not.) But if you want to take some direct personal responsibility for tackling your unavoidable carbon footprint, and you want to do something simple and practical on behalf of poor communities across the world, you could do a lot worse than explore the best which offsets have to offer.