The REP Wrap: Google pays ‘record low’ price for carbon removals

Your weekly summary of corporate sustainability news.

Google and Microsoft both announced plans to purchase more carbon removal credits this week. Google is forking out $10m for carbon removals generated by direct air capture, in a deal with start-up Holocene. The firm said it would pay $100 per ton, making it “the lowest price on record for this technology”. Holocene uses organic compounds to capture carbon, which Google said could slash the cost of carbon removal “significantly” in the future. Meanwhile, Microsoft has signed up to buy more than 200,000 tons of forest-based carbon removals from Mexican start-up Toroto.

The German Chancellor has asked the EU to pause its controversial deforestation regulation because it is not “practicable”. According to a report in Bloomberg this week, Olaf Scolz said he had personally asked European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen to suspend the rules until concerns raised by the German printing industry had been resolved. The Deforestation Regulation has been criticised for imposing strict – and some say impractical and extraterritorial – rules to ensure European companies have deforestation-free supply chains. 

The UK’s Green Finance Institute has published a guide to making sustainable aviation fuel an investable sector. The body spent two years working with the government, investors and industry to work out how to make the technology “a prime target” for public and private funding. GFI also published a guide to electric vehicle infrastructure. 

The European Financial Reporting Advisory Group (EFRAG) has thrown its weight behind a UN tool that companies can use to help set their environmental thresholds and targets. The Sustainable Development Performance Indicators were developed by the UN’s Research Institute for Social Development, and are particularly relevant for firms trying to deal with the pollution, biodiversity and ecosystem requirements under the European Sustainability Reporting Standards. 

The EU’s greenhouse gas emissions have fallen by nearly 33% since 1990, while the region’s economy has grown by around 67% over the same period. Emissions covered by the Emissions Trading System dropped 15.5% last year compared with 2022, meaning they’ve almost halved since 2005 and the EU is well on track to achieve its goal of cutting them by 62% by the end of the decade. The figures come from the latest annual State of the Energy Union report. 

Environmental not-for-profit CDP has published a lengthy explanation of the EU Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive (CS3D), focusing on how eligible companies should deal with the climate governance of companies along their value chains.