Is carbon offsetting a con?
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Hello, it's Hannah Gelbart here. Thank you so much for joining us for this episode of What in the World from the BBC World Service. Now, the idea behind carbon offsetting is that you can kind of pay your way out of carbon emissions. So you can still drive, fly, and you can buy carbon credits that go towards schemes to compensate for it. And these schemes are things like planting trees or getting energy from renewable sources. They're set up in places like South America or Africa. But

But do they actually reduce the overall amount of carbon in the air? Are they just a distraction from climate change or even worse, a con?

I have got Esme Stallard, a BBC climate reporter here in the studio with me. Hello. Welcome to the show. Thank you. I'm excited we're doing this. We've spoken a lot about this topic, so I'm glad we're finally doing it. Yeah, it's great to have you in the studio. Now, when I have bought flights before, I've tried to offset some of my guilt, my flight shame, by clicking the little button that says, like, you can pay a couple of pounds towards carbon offsetting. But I have no idea if it works and where my money actually goes. So what is the idea? How is it meant to work?

There are certain sectors, certain areas of our economy, both as a country, but also for companies that are particularly difficult to reduce emissions. And flying is a fantastic example. Right now, we don't really have alternatives to reduce emissions if you want to fly. OK, I can't reduce my emissions. How can I still help to reduce emissions globally? So I'm still having an impact on climate change.

and meeting my climate targets. And the way to do this is to pay money to countries or other regions where maybe they can't afford to reduce their emissions, but by giving them money, they can. So it all kind of balances out, if you like. If money can flow from richer nations to developing ones,

It can provide jobs. It can help them reduce their emissions. It can provide growth. So in principle, it can be something that's great, not just in terms of helping tackle climate change, but for their economies. That's if it works, of course. It's not just tree planting, is it? What other kind of offsetting projects are there? No, there's sort of three categories that we put them in. So the first one is reduction. So can we actually just reduce the emissions getting released in the first place? So a really classic example that's talked about a lot is cook stoves.

So a lot of people who live in regions where maybe they're not connected to an electricity grid will often use a cook stove that uses gas or coal within their home. And so instead what happens is that you may pay for them to use a solar panel connected instead. And that reduces the amount of emissions that they use from cooking. The second area is removal.

So can we actually just remove emissions that have already been emitted from the atmosphere? Planting trees, classic example of that. It absorbs carbon dioxide. Exactly. It takes the carbon dioxide in and it stores it. We can also, we're looking at ways to do that in sort of a man-made form. So that's effectively technologies that suck the carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and store it underground.

And then the third one, potentially even the most controversial, is something called avoidance. So is there a way that we can avoid putting any emissions into the air in the first place? So as much as we can plant a tree to absorb carbon dioxide, equally cutting down a tree potentially would release it. So is there a way to potentially protect a forest and so we're not releasing a load of CO2 into the atmosphere? Why is avoidance so controversial? So there's kind of some...

key principles that are meant to be abided by when you buy carbon offsets. And the two main ones are called something called permanence and something called additionality. And basically what we mean by permanence is, is that actually going to last forever? Because effectively, we're tackling something over far longer than our lifespan.

So if you invest in protecting a forest, how long does that continue for? 100, 200, 500 years? If in 500 years that company doesn't exist anymore, who's protecting that forest? So that's a real difficulty. That's that permanence issue.

And the second issue is this thing called additionality. How do you actually know that giving that money towards whoever it is to protect that forest wasn't going to happen anyway? It's really, really difficult to prove that that forest was actually going to be cut down. Can you tell me what the evidence is for carbon offsetting? Like, does it actually work? Is it greenwashing? It's really hard to tell. And there's been a lot of research in recent years to actually try and quantify how...

how many of these carbon credits, these offsetting schemes, are actually doing what they say they can do. There was actually a recent paper which was quite shocking. It looked at about lots of different scientific papers assessing these projects, which covered about a fifth of all carbon offsets ever issued to date. So it was a huge, huge paper.

And it estimates only about 16% of those projects are actually achieving the emissions reductions they claim they are. And they say a lot of that is because there's overestimation happening. You know, as much as you might protect this forest, let's say from house building, all that might happen is another forest somewhere else gets cut down. So it's really, really difficult to achieve. There maybe needs to be more robustness brought into the process of assessing this. And it needs to kind of be uniform, potentially, rather than each company saying,

on their own basis kind of deciding, okay, this is how we're going to establish there was an emissions reduction here, for example. And there is a lot of frustration. I think both

amongst companies that are maybe doing it differently and they feel like they're being compared unevenly but also between countries that feel like some are kind of paying for more offsets than others and so it is a very kind of contentious market for sure and I think as a consumer it can be very difficult to actually know what's the right thing to do. Is there any evidence that carbon offsetting actually does more harm than good?

potentially in terms of if you look across the board, particularly at the kind of the impacts on local people, I think there are certainly arguments for that. The idea is that they are meant to be included in that process. But we've seen time and time again investigations by journalists, by NGOs suggesting that isn't happening. Human Rights Watch has been doing a lot of work on this. They recently found in Cambodia that there was mass clearing of local people without their consent.

that they were removed from the land in order to plant forests. So as much as potentially money is meant to flow into those regions, there is often a power dynamic issue going on here whereby local governments want that money and they need that money. But in that process, local people can kind of be in

I think there's also arguments in terms of environmental impact in terms of what kind of forests you're planting. You know, it's all well and good to say I'm going to go in there and plant this massive forest. But actually, the kind of quickest way to absorb carbon emissions is in sort of the short term, at least, is to plant trees that are very quick growing, but

But they're homogenous and they might not be diverse. So actually, what impact are they having on local ecosystems? And so in those situations, there is certainly an argument that should we actually be investing more of our money in trying to come up with solutions for alternatives to flying rather than just funneling all that money into offsetting?

Esme, we're going to hear from a climate activist in Nigeria now. This is Joshua. I'm Joshua Gebreleluwase. I am a 24-year-old Nigerian climate storyteller and environmental activist. For a country that still heavily relies on, you know, fossil fuels, you know, carbon offsetting can provide jobs, of course, if you think about that. It could provide new roles for generating revenue.

What I've come to understand is that these practices for carbon offsetting, however they may seem like they benefit the community on the surface, like saying we're going to provide jobs or we're going to help the environment. Oftentimes it ends up doing the opposite where people may get displaced from their lands because they want to use that land to plant trees or rewild.

And also there's just the argument that can be made that because Africa and Nigeria, of course, at large, doesn't contribute as much carbon emissions as the rest of the world, is it morally all right for us to be used for carbon offsetting, if that makes sense, right? I think how I would go about it is calling carbon offsetting like a complementary tool rather than a sort of standalone solution, right? ♪

It says, Mae, back to you. You were just at COP29, the climate conference. Was this something that was brought up there? It was. So...

Back in 2015, the Paris Climate Agreement, one of the key things that was on the table for discussion is something very sexually called Article 6. But effectively, it was a global carbon market. It was to say, OK, all the world's countries have got these climate targets. How can particularly rich nations who have got more aggressive climate targets because of their historic contribution to climate change, how can they achieve their climate targets? And it was decided that could we establish a global offsetting market? So could a country like the U.S.,

pay for another country like Senegal to transition to a green grid and in doing so count some of those emissions towards its own reduction. And so they've taken 10 years. Finally, in Azerbaijan in November, COP 29, they kind of gaveled through, signed off on this principle that a global carbon market would be established. Many countries have already set money aside and many developing nations are happy about this because they see that as a financial flow to them.

But obviously, there are some details to be worked out. I think some lessons to be learned from the voluntary market that companies have been involved in to make sure that the same mistakes, the same issues, the same environmental and human harm don't happen in this case. Big question here. Are carbon credits a con? Oh, big question. I think I always go back to the argument that carbon credits should be a last resort.

And so they should only be really being used for that really difficult to treat last 5% of your emissions that you can't get rid of. And I think if you see companies using them, all countries using them for a very significant share of their emissions, I think potentially they're distracting from the fact that they're not investing enough to move themselves away from emissions

producing emissions in those areas of their company or their country that they could do. I'm not sure what I should do next time I buy a flight. Should I do carbon offsetting or not? I think it's more about making you aware. If you feel like in buying carbon credit you've done research and it's made you aware of the impact, then that's potentially a good thing. There are other levers that you can pull as an individual.

instead of buying carbon credits, which kind of can help you find solutions, whether that be choosing companies differently, choosing governments differently. But I'm not going to comment whether you should buy an offset or not. But I think if you're researching it and you're aware of it and you can make informed decisions, then I guess that's better. You're not going to be my climate change agony aunt. You're not going to put my goat in the shape of Ben. Sorry, I'm not going to say if you buy the offset, you can fly as much as you want, unfortunately. Oh, Esme. I know. Esme, thank you so much for coming into the studio. Thanks for having me. ♪

Joshua, who we heard from earlier, thinks that if you can carbon offset, you should. Here he is again. Change begins with you, right? It begins with us. I'm very big on this sort of individual approach to combating, you know, climate change, turning off our lights, not using too much water, turning off

you know, reducing power consumption. Every single action we take is generally good for the environment as long as we're, you know, reducing our carbon emissions individually. However, we cannot say because we're trying to carbon offset or because we're trying to buy carbon credits, then we're doing the most. So if somebody tells me they're traveling to Kenya, for example, and they want to, you know, carbon offset, I would go for that. If that's by flying a better airline or by, you know, purchasing carbon credits, that is absolutely fine.

If you're somebody who is in a position of power, you're a politician, you're a business leader, then you should probably do a lot more. But if all you can do is just to fly better, then by all means, yes, I think that's necessary. Thank you for joining us. I'm Hannah Gelbart. This is What In The World from the BBC World Service. We'll see you next time. Bye. Yoga is more than just exercise. It's the spiritual practice that millions swear by.

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