Nearly 600 offsetting projects mapped
Database to improve scrutiny comes as Adidas and Lufthansa lose legal cases over offsets
Researchers have mapped nearly 600 carbon offsetting project to make them easier to track and scrutinise.
Renoster, which provides ratings for carbon credits, has plotted the exact locations of 575 nature-based projects across 55 countries, using a combination of geospatial data and information scraped from carbon project registries.
The projects are all related to trees and forest management.
According to the research, a significant portion lacked any public location data.
“Analysing and validating project emission reduction and baseline claims is obfuscated by the lack of freely available, standardised, georeferenced project boundaries,” said the researchers in a paper published in the journal Nature on Saturday.
“Carbon credits are managed by registries, typically non-profits, that have broad discretion over data sharing. This has resulted in many project boundaries not being available for independent emissions verification.”
Carbon market observers have warned this opacity is particularly problematic in instances in which the carbon savings being claimed by companies may have been wiped out by natural disasters.
Firms like Microsoft, BP and Sierra Pacific Industries, for example, have all allegedly bought and retired forest-related credits whose carbon savings have subsequently been lost as a result of wildfires.
During wildfires in Canada in 2023, NGO Carbon Plan claimed it “was nearly impossible to figure out if any of Canada’s offset projects were on fire”.
“That’s because the rules governing the global carbon market don’t always require a project to divulge its exact borders,” it noted.
Adidas and Lufthansa both lost lawsuits against Environmental Action Germany recently, over their use of carbon offsets.
Judges rules against the firms in two separate greenwashing cases brought by the NGO.
Cologne’s regional court found that Lufthansa customers choosing to offset their flights were given inadequate information about the nature and extent of the offsetting.
Meanwhile, another German regional court ordered Adidas to stop advertising itself as climate neutral by 2050, because it did not provide a clear plan to achieve the goal beyond 2030.
In particular, it said, there was ambiguity about the role of carbon offsets in its neutrality claim.