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THE CYCLE – OFFSET
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framework on methodologies or verification, a number of standards have
been created over the past year. Not only voluntary offsets but also CDMs,
which are already a quality label in themselves, have been subject to further
quality specification, for example under the widely recognized Gold Stan-
dard. Over a dozen voluntary offset standards have been developed in the
last few years. Yet no single standard has so far managed to establish itself
as
the
industry standard. Certain standards are limited to particular project
types (e.g.forestry), while others exclude some project types in order to fo-
cus on the social benefits of carbon projects.
Among the biggest are theGold Standard for CDMand JI, theGold Standard for
Voluntary Emission Reductions and the Voluntary Carbon Standard (VCS).
The Gold Standard
In 2003 the Gold Standard for CDMand JI (GS CDM) projects was developed
under the leadership of the WWF and was followed by the Gold Standard for
Voluntary Emission Reductions (GS VER) in 2006. The Gold Standard is
generally accepted as the standard with the most stringent quality criteria.
3 670
Flight Paris-New York and
return (average emission
per passenger)