A company can buy credits to offset its emissions. (agent)
A system that allows large corporations to buy carbon offsets in rain forests to cancel out their harmful emissions is essentially “useless”, an analysis by several media organizations showed on Wednesday.
Buying carbon credits by funding projects to protect rainforests has become a popular way for companies to claim they are carbon neutral, even though their activities generate gases that cause global warming.
However, about 90 percent of the credits offered by Vera, the world’s leading provider, are said to be “phantom credits,” according to a study by the British newspaper The Guardian, the German weekly Die Zeit and SourceMaterial, a non-profit investigative journalism organization. is likely to.
Their nine-month investigation, including an analysis of existing studies in Vera’s rainforest plans and on-the-ground reporting, found that offsets did not lead to an effective reduction in large-scale deforestation or any climate benefits.
The Guardian said, “According to two studies, only some of Vera’s rainforest projects showed evidence of deforestation reduction, with further analysis indicating that 94 per cent of the credits had no benefit on the climate.”
Vera, the world’s largest provider of carbon credits, having issued more than a billion carbon credits since 2009, wrote on its website that the studies it cited had reached “the wrong conclusions”.
It said their methodology “did not account for project-specific factors that lead to deforestation.”
To generate “carbon credits”, a project must be implemented to protect a portion of a rainforest and ensure it is not felled.
Thus, the area saved corresponds to the amount of carbon that the trees are able to absorb from the atmosphere.
A company can buy credits to offset its emissions.
Companies such as Vera must ensure that the projects they invest in are genuine and effective, although questions have long hung over the methodology used to determine this.
Vera said it has “recently” reviewed its calculation methods and is in the process of standardizing its methodology.
(This story has not been edited by NDTV staff and was auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
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