Carbon Offset Projects
Today, businesses are expected to operate in ways that support communities and protect the environment with accountability, transparency, compliance and disclosure.
CO2 emissions (Scope 1, 2 and 3) are the most dominant human-caused greenhouse gas that’s warming the planet and causing extreme climate emergencies. At this most urgent of times, companies committed to sustainability should prioritise decarbonisation that maximise carbon reduction, and at the same time, offset more hard to abate carbon emissions than they emit to achieve “carbon negative”.
Carbon offsetting is a useful transition tool in the fight against global warming, to buy us more time, to improve livelihoods and to protect nature, but only if the project is high-integrity and the carbon credits are high-quality.
Only purchase from a verified carbon credit provider with projects backed by science, rooted in integrity, and pricing transparency. They must be able to provide evidence of high-quality carbon credits, on where the money goes, on accredited certification with independent audits, on certified cuts in identified greenhouse gases and on measurable benefits that help create resilient ecosystems and thriving communities and economies.
NOW provides access to high-integrity Carbon Offset Projects with high-quality carbon credits with rebates and drives finance towards climate action activities that deliver on the Sustainable Development Goals.
The Science and Net Negative Emissions
According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), “net-negative emissions” is achieved by removing more human-caused greenhouse gases (GHG) from the atmosphere than are emitted.
The greenhouse gases driving global climate change are carbon dioxide (CO2) which is produced by burning fossil fuels, industrial production and land use change; methane (CH4) from below ground and under the seafloor, wetlands, cattle burps, fossil fuels, and landfill waste decomposition; nitrous oxide (N2O) from uncultivated soil under natural vegetation; and water vapour - sulfur hexafluoride (SF6), hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs), perfluorocarbons (PFCs), and nitrogen trifluoride (NF3) through irrigation, power plant cooling, aviation, and domestic water use.
To make the effects of different greenhouse gases comparable and provide a single, uniform means of measuring reductions, the IPCC has defined the unit of measurement to calculate the environmental impact and global warming potential that an activity, event or product would cause by emitting many different greenhouse gases over a set period of time. It considers them in the equivalent amount of carbon dioxide (abbreviated "CO2e").
Human-caused CO2 emissions (Scope 1, 2 and 3) can be avoided, reduced or removed. Methane, nitrous oxide and water vapour are more difficult to avoid, reduce or remove, and some are impossible to eliminate completely.
It’s urgent. The world’s leading climate scientists with the IPCC delivered assessment reports of the accelerating catastrophes without immediate action:
- April 2022: the IPCC Sixth Assessment Report warned that a century of rising carbon emissions must be capped before 2025, and decrease by half including methane by 1/3 before 2030, when our planet will likely reach 1.5°C (34.7°F), causing climate breakdown and irreversible destruction in nature. The report also warned that it is now “almost inevitable” that temperatures would rise above 1.5°C (34.7°F) this decade – the level above which many of the effects of climate breakdown will become irreversible.
- June 2023: ‘The Final Warning Bell’ report published by the Climate Crisis Advisory Group (CCAG), leading authorities in climate science, carbon emissions, energy, environment, and natural resources, warned that Net Negative strategies are urgently required and current global emissions targets to reach Net Zero CO2 emissions by 2050 is now “too little too late”. It is likely that global temperatures will exceed 1.5°C (34.7°F) as soon as 2030, taking the world into a zone of dangerous climate change.
NOTE: For the first time from February 2023 to January 2024, global warming has exceeded 1.5C across an entire year, according to the EU's Copernicus Climate Change Service.
