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KICK THE HABIT
THE CYCLE – OFFSET
170
Carbon offset standards
There have been many problems with the carbon offset market, and in par-
ticular with the voluntary market, in the past.
One problem is that the offset industry lacking transparency. Some excel-
lent offset projects do address climate change, help wildlife and ecosystems
and produce social benefits, but others have little or nothing to show for
all their claims. Beyond that, the price of an offset for a specified amount
of carbon can vary wildly between different companies. The offset industry
offers a variety of calculations and prices for what sometimes appears to be
the same activity.
Where carbon registries are missing, double counting can arise when sever-
al people try to take the credit for the GHG emissions reduced by one proj-
ect. This can occur unintentionally through bad management of a project
with a bad audit trail, or deliberately when somebody tries selling a credit
more than once – a fraudulent act.
Projects sometimes simply fail, in both the compliance market as well as in
the voluntary market. In one famous case 40 per cent of the trees in an off-
set plantation died because not enough water was made available to support
the project. The same sort of thing can happen when a project causes unin-
tended damage. For example, if a forestry scheme uses a significant amount
of a local water supply, this can damage local agriculture and people’s ability
to grow crops outside the project.
Another trap to beware of is that your project should not be to the detriment
of the people “profiting from it”. One example reported involved a project
which was accused of working only because people were obliged to use low
technology to avoid emitting CO
2
– hand-powered pumps relying for energy
on human muscles, which critics said perpetuated underdevelopment. The
project’s supporters, though, said the people using the pumps had deliber-
ately chosen them.
When looking at the wide range of projects, providers and locations of off-
setting projects, you would probably appreciate some guidance in this off-
set-jungle. In particular with voluntary offsets, where there is no unified