How to pick the right carbon offsets

Duncan Oswald CEnv FIEMA, Climate science lead at Sage Earth, looks at the complex world of carbon offsetting, giving you a guide on what to look out for.  

We look at:

Sage Net Zero commitment and SBTi offsetting recommendations

Sage has made a commitment under the Science Based Targets initiative (SBTi) to be Net Zero by 2040.

SBTi doesn’t allow you to decarbonise using offsets, but they do accept that some emissions may never be eliminated, so up to 10% of your baseline emissions can be offset, once you have eliminated the other 90%.

The offsets that you can use for this purpose have to meet certain specific criteria:

“Companies shall remove carbon from the atmosphere and permanently store it to counterbalance the impact of any unabated emissions that remain once companies have achieved their long-term science-based target, and for subsequent years thereafter.”

The critical part of this requirement is that offsets must draw down emissions from the atmosphere (rather than acting to reduce additional emissions), and that their effect must be permanent.

Criteria for effective offsets

For any offset to be effective, there are a few other criteria that must also be delivered. Together with the SBTi requirements, these are summarised below:

Additionality

Additionality means offsetting activity wouldn’t have happened without the incentive provided by selling carbon credits.

An example of where this is not the case is those schemes where credits have been sold to protect forests from logging, where logging would have been illegal anyway because the forest was in a National Park.

Permanence