5
Getting to western and central Europe by train was all well and good – but what if I wanted to get somewhere ultra-long haul where flight-free travel options just weren’t feasible? Could I do so with a clear conscience by embracing the practice increasingly promoted by airlines as a quick fix to counter emissions: the dark art of offsetting? It was time to investigate whether carbon credits could be a legitimate way to hop on a plane, guilt-free.
In 2019, easyJet made a bold statement, announcing with much fanfare that it was going to be the first major airline to operate ‘net-zero’ flights by offsetting the carbon emissions from the fuel used for every passenger service.
Britain’s biggest low-cost carrier was going to achieve this ambitious-sounding goal by ‘investing in projects that include the planting of trees or protecting against deforestation and renewable energies’. It added, rather tellingly: ‘We know carbon offsetting is not perfect, but right now we believe it’s the best way to address the carbon emitted from flying.’
We know carbon offsetting is not perfect was seemingly easyJet’s way of anticipating environmentalists’ less-than-enthusiastic response to the news. We know carbon offsetting is not perfect was a way of pre-empting any criticism about this deeply problematic approach to addressing emissions produced by flying.
Carbon offsetting is one of the most contentious issues when it comes to air travel – and carbon emissions in general. Not so long ago, voluntary offsetting was an incredibly niche concern, adopted by only the greenest of sandal wearers to try to balance the scales. Then, just like that, pow! Like the condemning of plastic straws, the take-up of keep cups and conversions to veganism, it entered the zeitgeist as a way of ‘doing your bit’.
While those using it are still very much in the minority, carbon offset company Cool Effect said individual purchases of its offsets rose 700 per cent between May and December 2019; Gold Standard, which certifies carbon offsetting programmes, saw offsets bought by individuals multiply by six from 2018 to 2019. Even royalty have been reduced to using it as an excuse when trying to get out of a tight spot: Prince Harry and Meghan Markle gave carbon offsetting as their primary defence in the summer of 2019 after being hounded by the press for taking multiple trips by private jet.
You didn’t have to worry about flying less anymore – now, you could fly to your heart’s content, and simply pay a bit more not to worry about it. Or, in the case of easyJet, let the airline worry about it for you. For many of us, it’s the perfect means of appeasing our consciences without having to sacrifice our desire to keep travelling quickly and cheaply. We can pay some money and balance the scales – if I launched my own carbon offsetting project, I’d call it Guilt-Be-Gone! (exclamation mark included).
And, if it really resulted in carbon-neutral air travel, it would be the perfect product. Guilt-free flying on net-zero flights: sign me up. The one teensy, tiny problem? In reality, it’s a whole lot more complicated than that.
What is carbon offsetting?
Let’s start at the very beginning (a very good place to start).
The original thinking behind carbon offsetting goes like this: if countries are given certain targets to reduce their emissions, as they were in the Kyoto Protocol (a 2005 international treaty that committed industrialised countries and economies in transition to limit and reduce greenhouse gases) and the Paris Agreement (the first-ever legally binding global climate change agreement adopted worldwide, signed in 2016, which set out the aim of limiting the increase in global average temperatures to ‘well below 2°C above pre-industrial levels’), that target needs to be reached overall – but there’s quite a lot of flexibility around how it’s achieved.1 If a country committed to reducing carbon emissions by 70 per cent within a certain timeframe, for example, some parts of the economy might find it fairly easy to decarbonise – and might even go above and beyond, reducing their emissions by, say, 90 per cent. Another industry may struggle based on the nature of what they do (coal plants, as a rule, are not going to find this easy). But it’s the big picture that matters in offsetting, so our coal plant, instead of having to reduce its emissions by 70 per cent, can purchase that first company’s ‘extra’ emissions savings they made on top of the target – they can buy that 20 per cent. In fact, they don’t have to stop there. They could buy extra reductions, in the form of carbon credits, from a developing country where an emissions-reduction project has been set up. More than 200 types of carbon offsetting projects have been given the nod by the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM), which certifies emission-reduction projects in these countries.
One of the most common types of offsetting schemes, favoured by many because it’s cheap and relatively easy, is to plant trees. Trees absorb carbon – they ‘breathe’ it in. Therefore, if you plant enough of them it can technically pick up the slack for extra carbon emissions produced elsewhere. But reforestation is just the start of it. There are all kinds of offsetting projects, many with a focus on emissions reduction rather than removal. Renewable energy schemes are common in the offsetting world: for example, investing in wind farms, biomass energy, biogas digesters or hydroelectric dams. These don’t absorb carbon in the way that trees do – the emphasis here is on replacing energy produced by fossil fuels with ‘clean’ energy.
What are the different kinds of offsets?
In general, schemes can be split into one of four categories: the capture of greenhouse gases for use or destruction; the reduction of greenhouse gases by reducing the amount of fuel or electricity needed to perform various activities; the capture and storage of greenhouse gases; or the reduction of carbon emissions by moving from fossil fuels to renewable sources of energy such as solar and wind energy.2
We won’t stray too deeply into the murky world of carbon emissions trading – where, instead of reducing their emissions in line with what’s required, companies can throw money at the problem by buying up carbon credits to offset their output – but suffice to say it’s a thriving industry. It turns out our actions as individuals are being reflected on the global stage; just as many of us would rather say ‘f*** it’, jump on a plane and worry about our carbon footprint at some later, unspecified date, so would many industries.
No, rather than the compliance market, where government regulations require businesses to curb their emissions or buy up offsets by law, we’ll be looking at the voluntary market, where regular Joes, like you and me, can buy offsets of our own volition.
This is a market that has blossomed in recent years, though it’s still a minority of us who are doing it. Around 2 per cent of all online airline seat sales are offset, according to IATA,3 while just 1 per cent of flyers use voluntary programmes to offset their emissions.4 The voluntary market works in a similar way to the compliance market, but the difference is there’s no central certification scheme like the CDM. Instead, various certifications and brokers have sprung up in this space to certify and sell carbon credits. While this means there’s a tonne of choice – and in fact, in some cases might mean voluntary schemes are actually more trustworthy – it makes the whole thing harder to navigate as a consumer. With no centralised body, the onus is on you to do your homework and find the legitimate schemes.
How does it work in practice?
If I pay a tree-planting scheme to offset my flight, what happens next? Do they calculate how many trees would be needed to absorb my carbon and then get out there with a spade?
I can’t be the only one who didn’t realise that when you’re buying a carbon credit, ‘credit’ is the operative word. In fact, what you’re buying is an amount of emissions that has already been saved. This is how it works, in brief: a project is set up, for example, to plant trees. The trees are planted, they grow, the CO2 reduction is calculated. Ideally some kind of certification scheme checks their work and verifies their calculations (if they’re legit). They are awarded a certain number of carbon credits – each one representing 1 tonne of CO2 that has been removed (or reduced) – which they can then sell, with the money usually going back into the scheme to, for instance, pay for more tree planting, thus creating more carbon credits. Once a credit has been bought, it gets ‘retired from the register’, meaning it can never be sold again. So, in reality, you’re paying for something that has already been done.
‘There’s a logic behind it,’ says Julian Ekelhof, director of CO2OL Climate Solutions, which oversees various sustainable land-use projects including reforestry:
We’d prefer it the other way around, because that’s most intuitive. But that wouldn’t be robust enough. It’s done from a transparency and robustness perspective: you have to prove that the trees have been planted and demonstrate the decarbonisation you’ve already achieved. Only once it’s been proven can you go ahead and sell it as credits.
You have to perform the climate effect before you can monetise it, otherwise it’s too high-risk – there’s a chance the tree doesn’t grow or simply doesn’t get planted in the first place.
It means projects have to pay the cash up front in the knowledge they’ll make the money back later, which can be challenging. Every few years, projects are audited again, and new emissions reductions calculated, unlocking further carbon credits that can be sold and enabling the project to continue.
The same process is pretty much true no matter what the type of offset, although it’s important to remember that there are a limited number of schemes where CO2 is actually being removed from the atmosphere – trees being one of them – while a large proportion of projects just cut emissions by reducing the amount of fuel or electricity needed to perform an activity or by moving from fossil fuels to renewable sources of energy. Obviously, this is a good thing – but the idea we might have of a straightforward ‘I produced this many tonnes of CO2 by flying, and I bought carbon credits that took away the same amount of CO2’ is usually a world away from reality.
And, in fact, experts are keen to draw the distinction. There are carbon reduction projects, and there are carbon removal projects, and the latter are far preferable, according to the climate scientists I speak to. In September 2020, a team from Oxford University launched the Oxford Principles for Net Zero Aligned Carbon Offsetting (or the ‘Oxford Offsetting Principles’), to provide guidelines to help ensure offsetting ‘actually helps to achieve a net zero society’.5 One of the key tenets? Second only to cutting our own emissions first and foremost and investing in high-quality offsets was switching to carbon removal offsetting.
‘Most offsets available today are emission reductions, which are necessary but not sufficient to achieve net zero in the long run,’ said the principles:
Carbon removals scrub carbon directly from the atmosphere. Users of offsets should increase the portion of their offsets that come from carbon removals, rather than from emission reductions, ultimately reaching 100 per cent carbon removals by midcentury to ensure compatibility with the Paris Agreement goals.
Duncan McLaren, professor in practice for the Lancaster Environment Centre at Lancaster University, agrees that in thirty years the current offsetting model will be obsolete. He tells me:
Fast forward to 2050: everything seems to be planned around this date for reaching net zero. Once you get to a place of cutting emissions by 100 per cent, the only offsets that can be left in a system like that are removals. We can’t have the same system as right now.
So … does offsetting work?
That’s the million-dollar question. And, in truth, the answer is yes and no. (Or ‘it’s complicated’ in the parlance of Facebook relationship statuses circa 2008.)
The big point to remember here is that these schemes need to be ‘additional’ – not existing projects that were happening anyway, but ones that only exist for offsetting purposes. For example, some offsetting projects are classified as ‘forest preservation’; i.e., someone can charge money for simply making sure an existing woodland doesn’t get the chop. Aside from the fact this is pretty sketchy as an offsetting concept to begin with, in many cases the forest might already have been being protected, funded by an environmental organisation or government grants, and therefore there’s nothing ‘additional’ about it.
In fact, three-quarters of projects are unlikely to have resulted in additional emissions reductions and just 2 per cent have a high likelihood of being classed as ‘additional’, according to a 2016 study for the European Commission into United Nations-sanctioned offset projects.6 That’s because most energy-related offsetting projects are likely to happen anyway. There’s already a strong demand for clean energy and ‘a market that will pay’, according to Friends of the Earth.
Professor McLaren tells me about a real-life example that sums up the ‘additional’ issue. A colleague of his got married, and the newlyweds asked all their friends and family to donate to an offsetting forestry project as their wedding present. A few years later, the couple decided to visit the forest; but when they asked the site manager to point out ‘their’ trees, they were told everything had been paid for by a woodland grant. The trees would have been planted regardless thanks to this money – the project was not ‘additional’ at all. It’s a problem called ‘double counting’ and is one of the potential pitfalls that come with offsetting.
Clearly, this doesn’t apply to all projects; but there are other issues too.
For offsetting to truly work, whatever the scheme is has to permanently lock away or reduce carbon emissions – otherwise it just doesn’t add up. Balance is not restored. Tree planting, on the face of it, is a simple, effective way of storing carbon; as a tree matures, it can take in 21kg of CO2, plus other greenhouse gases, per year. But trees, as we know all too well, are exceptionally vulnerable. Forest fires, pests, deforestation: all these things happen with enough regularity that we know trees are in no way a ‘permanent’ storage solution. A study in the US found that the number of trees that die from pests per year is the equivalent of 5 million cars’ worth of emissions.7
Elsewhere, emissions calculators don’t always add up. Things can get murky with flying in particular, because a tonne of CO2 from a plane is not the equivalent of a tonne emitted at ground level. Burning fuel at altitude produces a load of other harmful emissions and impacts that also contribute to warming the planet.
In the voluntary sector, at least, there is a pretty good level of reassurance now that, if you’re buying through a reputable scheme backed up by a reputable certification, the emissions savings will be accurate and the scheme itself will provide additionality. But that’s no longer the biggest issue opponents have with offsetting.
Putting off action
Perhaps the biggest problem of all with the entire concept of offsetting is that it can provide a false sense of security – a comfort blanket that allows us to put off doing the urgent mitigation work that’s needed to tackle the climate crisis. On a compliance level, it allows high-emissions industries to delay the point at which they have to hugely adapt their businesses to decarbonise. Industries like the aviation sector, for example. Professor McLaren says:
This is one of the reasons we haven’t made the progress we’d like to with cutting emissions. The pressure from companies in those markets means there’s been a lot of latitude – it’s easy to buy excess emissions permits and maintain your form of business that involves producing emissions. What offsetting has done is make it easier to move slowly. In fact, offsetting as a market tool is one of the reasons we’re now in the hole we’re in.
Stefan Gössling, a professor at the Linnaeus University School of Business and Economics and Lund University’s Department of Service Management, who specialises in sustainable tourism, concurs that offsetting is at odds with decarbonising air travel: ‘If offsetting is your strategy, how are you thinking about the future? How are we going to fly carbon free at some point?’
The plus side
Offsetting can remove the incentive to change. That said, there certainly are reputable projects, and although not viable in the long term, in the short term they can be vital as part of an overall emissions reductions strategy, argues Julian Ekelhof: ‘Are offsets the solution? Definitely not. No one working in this field would say that. But it is one measure we can use – so many things need to be combined for us to achieve our targets.’
When asked how we can rely on a project making a real difference, he makes a convincing case:
Long-running forestry carbon projects, for example, have been monitored over several decades now. It’s been proven to be solid. Risk is reduced with assessment, you have measures in place for fire protection and disease control, you have to prove you have the land title so no one cuts down the trees. If there’s a harvest, that’s taken into consideration. Plus, there are risk buffer systems – you always have to over-produce, to over-perform for what is used as carbon credits, so that you’re still covered if one part of the project is lost.
He adds:
There are certain inherent risks, but it’s not like anyone is planting trees and hoping for the best. Not every reforestation project should be a carbon project. But with the ones that are, the risk is so minimal that the benefits far outweigh the problems.
What about greenhouse gas removal?
Forget trees – there’s now a heap of carbon removal tech out there, often heralded as our saving grace.
DAC
First up, there’s direct air capture (DAC) or, as I like to call it, the magical carbon-sucking machine. It sounds like pure science fiction: a tool that’s capable of absorbing carbon from the atmosphere, which is then stored away underground. A 2019 study published in Nature Communications said this technology could help us meet the Paris Agreement’s temperature targets at a lower cost.8 So why are we even bothering to cut emissions at all?
Well, as with all things in life, if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is. The same study outlined that DAC would have to be rolled out intensively and at a breath-taking speed to achieve the required results. And, more importantly, in their modelling of future impacts, the study authors found that the energy needed to run the machines would hit 300 exajoules a year by 2100. That’s the equivalent of half of all current energy supplies. Or, to put it another way, the energy demands of China, the US, the EU and Japan combined. Or, to put it another way, running 300 internets simultaneously. Even if energy demand goes up as predicted, it would still have to use a quarter of all energy supplies by 2100; and using a quarter of the entire world’s energy supplies to get us out of a hole we’re still doggedly digging for ourselves instead of, y’know, stopping digging now, sounds a little frivolous.
Even the study’s authors warned of the dangers of relying on DAC to do the work rather than cutting emissions. ‘Inappropriate interpretations [of our findings] would be that DAC is a panacea and that we should ease near-term mitigation efforts because we can use it later in the century,’ said study author Ajay.
Dr Nico Bauer, a scientist at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impacts Research, told Carbon Brief of the paper:
Policymakers should not make the mistake to believe that carbon removals could ever neutralise all future emissions that could be produced from fossil fuels that are still underground. Even under pessimistic assumptions about fossil fuel availability, carbon removal cannot and will not fix the problem. There is simply too much low-cost fossil carbon that we could burn.9
There’s also the issue of what to do with the greenhouse gases once you’ve removed them. Some schemes build up the amount of carbon in the biological environment, such as planting trees or putting carbon back into the soil: both of which are fairly short-term solutions. Many ideas revolve around trying to get carbon back underground in mineral form, a much more permanent type of capture.
BECCS
One of the most commonly discussed technologies is bioenergy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS). You harvest biomass (e.g. trees), and process it in a way that can be used to produce energy. If, for example, you burn the trees, you then use chemicals to capture the carbon they release as it comes up the chimney and store it underground. As long as you replace the trees, in theory you have a carbon-negative energy-production process: trees take carbon from the atmosphere, you burn it, capture it and store it underground.
CCU
Other techniques have been developed, too, where the carbon captured isn’t stored somewhere, but is reused, a process known as carbon capture and utilisation (CCU). It could be used to carbonate drinks; more excitingly still, it could be used to create hydrocarbons, taking hydrogen from water and carbon from the air to create synthetic electrofuels. Why should I give two hoots about synthetic electrofuels, you ask? Well, these are the very kind of fuels that could conceivably be used to power planes at some point in the future. If you got the balance right, you could end up with carbon-neutral aviation using this tech, whereby flights are recycling the same amount of carbon they emit. The possibilities are actually pretty exciting, even for us non-science types.
Is GGR the answer?
Many climate scientists agree that greenhouse gas removal (GGR) technology is going to be a fundamental piece of the puzzle in achieving a carbon-neutral society.
Dr Roger Tyers, a researcher in environmental sociology specialising in behaviour change and public policy, certainly thinks so:
I have a lot of faith in those kinds of man-made solutions. Natural solutions don’t really work. Carbon neutrality will have to involve man-made carbon negative emissions technology. It’s going to involve machines. You can’t just compensate by planting more trees, nice as that sounds – it’s like taking a knife to a gun fight.
In a way it seems counterintuitive – we pollute the atmosphere with machines and then we’re using machines to deal with the problem – but Mother Nature doesn’t care about what’s aesthetically pleasing.
Professor McLaren agrees:
Almost certainly we’ve got to the point where it seems highly unlikely to achieve our desired temperature outcomes by simply reducing emissions. Even with the best will in the world, we’re not going to step off a cliff and halt all emissions tomorrow. When you take into account the significant amount of emissions that will still be produced between now and 2050, we’re going to need these technologies.
What’s problematic is when we start to rely too heavily on the idea that future technology can ‘save’ us, and that we don’t need to drastically change the way we live now to make it less carbon intensive. Professor McLaren says:
The risk is that we collectively do less to cut emissions now, because GGR tech seems to have the potential to roll back time. It means notionally we might assume we can emit now and take it back later. But at the moment, GGR technology does not exist at the scale we would need to do that. We can’t just imagine infinite carbon removal to remove infinite emissions.
There’s always a cost to these technologies, whether it be massive energy consumption or the requirement for great swathes of land. In one climate modelling forecast, the model highly recommended the mass use of BECCS to sort out the problem of excess emissions; the programme ran the information and decided it looked much easier and cheaper than doing the hard work of reducing emissions. But its modelling required a piece of land twice the size of India in order to grow enough biomass to achieve the stipulated targets. There is always, always a cost, and it’s usually too high.
This tech needs to be used thoughtfully and strategically, too, for the emissions we absolutely cannot eliminate – not as a catch-all to ensure our lifestyles can remain unchanged. If we have a limited amount of capacity for GGR technologies, due to the constraints of land or energy use outlined above, there’s a danger that it could be sold to the highest bidder rather than ringfenced for those who need it most. Professor McLaren continues:
The thing that worries me is seeing big companies making net zero pledges. Very few are saying they’re going to cut emissions to next to zero. They say they’ll cut emissions by 30, 50, 70 per cent – and then they’re going to use removals. Aviation and big tech could end up annexing all the carbon removal capacity that we have.
So … yeah. Back to that Facebook status: it’s complicated. GGR is a tool that’s likely essential in helping us meet our climate targets, just like regular offsetting – but it ain’t no silver bullet.
Can I trust the offsetting industry?
Despite the recent surge in interest, voluntary offsetting for flights still has a pretty low uptake. Partly it’s down to cost – a bona fide offset won’t actually come that cheap – and partly it’s down to lack of trust in the system.
‘People thought that carbon offsets were not likely to actually deliver what they were reported to and had scepticism about whether the money is going to go to planting trees or fund renewable energy,’ said Dr Tyers in a 2018 study he conducted to look at whether ‘nudging’ consumers to use voluntary carbon offsetting schemes for air travel would work.10 Using controlled trials and focus groups, the technique was largely found to be ‘ineffectual’.
Where does this lack of trust come from? Well, for many years the voluntary carbon market was a sector that felt a little like the Wild West. In its early days, many project developers used ‘internal methodologies’ to calculate their schemes’ emissions reductions. There were no checks, no verifications from a central body – you could just work out your own numbers (potentially rounding up if you felt so inclined), submit them, and there would be no repercussions. The double-counting issue we looked at earlier was a huge problem, as was transparency when it came to trying to research a project yourself as a consumer.
Things have improved considerably since then; today, the majority of projects follow rules and procedures set out by an external certification standard, meaning they have to meet a third party’s criteria and work to their methodologies in order to sell carbon credits. Regulation is a lot tighter now than it was even a decade ago. But, even so, it’s difficult to navigate as a well-intentioned traveller.
According to Sarah Leugers, the director of communications for offsetting certification scheme Gold Standard, the voluntary market in its current form cropped up ‘because of a failure of political will’:
The various standards were created to try to fill some of the gap that national negotiators have left. There’s been some good in that organic ability to innovate; different standards have been introduced to fit different needs. We didn’t work in forestry at all initially, so another certification cropped up to fill that. It’s really about bottom-up innovation.
Gold Standard is one of the most exacting certifications dealing with the voluntary market. It was originally set up in 2003 by conservation NGO WWF specifically because they were concerned that the UN’s CDM certification was not robust enough. And for a project to qualify, it really does have to deliver what it says on the tin (and then some). Sarah says:
A project has to design-in not just climate benefits, but impact for at least two other sustainable development goals in order to qualify. They have to submit a monitoring plan that’s approved. After planning, the project gets design certification, which is reviewed by an independent third party. It moves forward, the impact is measured, and after around a year the project goes through performance certification – a third party again reviews it and does a site visit. That’s when our partner says yes, this project should be issued x number of carbon credits.
Projects have to prove their ‘additionality’ (to dispel those double-counting worries) and provide accurate baselines before going ahead so that there’s clear, measurable proof of the climate impact later down the line. It’s a lengthy process. Not only that – a scheme can’t get certification if it’s reducing emissions but to the detriment of the local people. Projects must adhere to a comprehensive set of safeguards, both environmental and social, to ensure local stakeholders are engaged and on board.
As a consumer, there’s also a reassuring amount of data available if you’re buying credits from an initiative that follows an internationally recognised standard. Sarah continues:
You can go to our registry and look up monitoring reports and verification reports, all publicly available. If someone were to purchase directly from us, they would see credits they bought being retired from the registry in real time, so there’s a real traceability connected to the purchase.
Julian Ekelhof, whose forestry schemes are Gold Standard certified, agrees that transparency is built into the process:
The certification includes hundreds of pages of documentation, criteria, independent auditing and monitoring of the project. There’s complete transparency – you can look it all up.
There’s also a period of public consultation – so if you’re being verified, there’s a period where everyone can check exactly what the auditor has done. We’ve had people visiting the project, we’ve worked with universities, we invite anyone with a question about the project to come directly to us. The projects’ locations are public as well – if you want you can even look us up and see satellite images to check the forests really do exist.
Of course, Gold Standard isn’t the only certification in the voluntary market. To name but a few, there’s the Verified Carbon Standard (also confusingly known as VCS or Verra); the Voluntary Offset Standard (VOS); Climate, Community and Biodiversity Standards (CCB); Brasil Mata Viva Standard (BMV); and SOCIALCARBON. And each has its own list of criteria that projects must meet in order to qualify, plus its own methodologies in calculating climate impact.
Wouldn’t it be easier if there was just one centralised body or regulator so you knew which offsets were absolutely worth your money? Well, yes, is the short answer – and it’s something that is increasingly gaining traction. Dr Tyers states:
Standardisation would help. The UN is trying to do something about this. Whether I like it or not, offsetting isn’t going away – I think if one body came out and said, ‘these offsets are good, these ones are not,’ that would meaningfully go some way towards helping consumers have confidence.
The former governor of the Bank of England Mark Carney is heading up the Taskforce on Scaling Voluntary Carbon Markets (TSVCM), aimed specifically at increasing the size, efficiency and transparency of the voluntary carbon market; some kind of standardisation might well come out of the taskforce’s recommendations.
‘We’re trying to create a global set of standards that hopefully can influence government policy,’ said Bill Winters, chief executive of Standard Chartered and Taskforce chair.11 ‘Part of the objective here is to put clear, transparent standards and benchmarks out there.’
How can you tell if an offset is legit?
It can feel overwhelming to discern which offsets are delivering the goods in a sea of conflicting information and rampant cynicism. First off, it’s worth ensuring that whatever offsetting scheme you use is verified by an internationally recognised independent standard. From there, do a bit of research if you want peace of mind: how transparent is the project? Is more information easily available, such as audits, the location, in-depth details about how it operates and the amount of emissions reduced? If it seems in any way opaque, that should be red-flag central. Gold Standard’s Sarah says:
Make sure you look at the fine print. Look at where the money’s going, what the underlying standards are, and make sure they disclose the proceeds. It’s up to people to do a little more due diligence, like with almost any sustainability claim these days.
Forestry Project Manager Julian Ekelhof is adamant that checking the robustness of a scheme goes ‘beyond certification’ too:
Yes, the first stop is absolutely that it’s a requirement to be certified. But you have to look further. It’s not just, do the trees grow – but was there a consultation with local stakeholders, is anyone else claiming the carbon offset, for example the government, the locals, a company that uses it in their supply chain. Look for the project design document – if it’s public, you know it’s been peer reviewed and checked. Is there more than a nice picture gallery? Is there information on the location available, has someone with no vested interest visited the project? These things are crucial.
There’s also a distinction between schemes that reduce emissions and those that remove them, as we saw earlier. If what you really want is to restore balance in a more literal sense when you fly, consider opting for something that actually takes CO2 out of the atmosphere. One example is Climeworks, which uses DAC technology to remove CO2 and transform it into carbonate minerals stored 800–2,000m underground. If you need more convincing, Greta (yes, that Greta) even visited one of their plants in March 2020 to see how the tech could be used in the fight to stop global warming.
Finally, the uncomfortable reality is that any carbon credit worth its salt will set you back a few bob. If it costs £1 to tag an ‘offset’ onto a flight as an optional extra, for example, there’s no way it’s anything more than greenwashing.
‘You can’t trust incredibly cheap offsets,’ warns Dr Tyers. ‘The only truly meaningful offsets are fairly expensive.’ Sustainable transport expert Professor Gössling agrees that a good offset will ‘probably cost at least £20 a tonne’. In real terms, this means a round trip from London to New York – which produces, on average, 2.8 tonnes of emissions (in total, including warming impacts other than CO2) per economy passenger – would set you back an extra £60. Bear this in mind if you’re shopping around: carbon credits are a commodity where getting a ‘good deal’ actually isn’t a good deal at all.
How do I calculate my emissions?
In terms of calculating emissions specifically relating to aviation – and therefore taking into account extra harmful gases released when fuel is burned at altitude – Atmosfair is recommended to me by several experts, including Jo Dardenne, aviation manager for NGO collective the European Federation for Transport and Environment. A German non-profit, Atmosfair specialises in using voluntary climate payments from private individuals and businesses to fund renewable energy projects in fifteen developing countries. The best bit about using it to offset flights is that Atmosfair’s emissions calculator has been finely calibrated for flights. As its website reads:
The calculations include the effects of the different pollutants according to the latest scientific knowledge, especially to their impact at high altitude … flight altitude, aircraft type, the number of seats on board and how many of them are occupied all play a very important role in the calculation of emissions.
What is the aviation industry doing?
While most airlines and various countries’ aviation industries are promising to become greener – the global aviation industry says it aims to halve emissions (compared to 2005 levels) by 2050, and the UK aviation industry has pledged to cut its net carbon emissions to zero by the same year – it’s really important to note that aviation was not included under the Paris Agreement. Yes, you heard me correctly. The Paris Agreement ‘does not establish sector-specific goals for addressing potential temperature rise’ – and that has largely left it up to individual nations to decide what limits to impose.12
In the UK’s case, that meant putting off addressing the issue for as long as possible. The 2008 Climate Change Act was supposed to apply to all sectors, outlining how emissions needed to be cut. But international aviation and shipping were both left out of the five-year carbon budgets, seemingly because it was quite tricky to calculate.13 The government did the equivalent of shoving it under the mattress – out of sight, out of mind – but promised that these industries would be included by 2012. But 2012 came and went, and aviation emissions continued to be kept separate from overall targets. Although carbon budgets for other sectors were set with the aviation issue in mind – allowing for emissions from flights and airports to take up around a whopping 25 per cent of all of the UK’s total permitted carbon emissions by 2050 – this was not officially enshrined in law. This led to a situation where the government could both make a lot of noise about hitting net zero by 2050 while simultaneously supporting airport expansion.
Think about it: every sector’s getting limits put on it, caps that mean it has to radically change how it operates or invest heavily in offsetting schemes. But not airlines. They could keep flying as much as they like, free from restraint, with no incentive to adapt.
In fact, the UK only included aviation and shipping emissions for the first time in its sixth official climate budget, in 2021 – and even then it doesn’t come into effect until 2033. This, despite the UK being responsible for the third-highest amount of CO2 emissions from aviation globally, behind only the US and China.14
The industry is still attempting to skirt the problem by coming up with its own version of what it believes will balance the scales – or at least have the appearance of doing so. Allow me to introduce you to the Carbon Offsetting and Reduction Scheme for International Aviation – more commonly known as CORSIA – a mitigation approach developed by the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO). From 2027, CORSIA has stipulated that airlines will have to purchase carbon offsets for all international flights. Michael Gill, IATA’s director for aviation environment, said:
It’s mandatory in the sense that it creates obligations on airlines to purchase offsets rather than obligations on individual passengers. [Airlines] will be obliged for every year after the scheme comes into effect to purchase offsets in respect of any growth in their emissions above the 2020 baseline.
The money will be pumped into reforestation and renewable energy projects, with the scheme aiming to introduce more transparent criteria for offsetting aviation emissions than is currently found in the voluntary market. We’re about to have our flights offset whether we want to or not. Does this mean we can relax?
Ha! If only. Any growth above the 2020 baseline is the key bit to watch out for here. The idea was originally for 2020 emissions levels to form the baseline for each airline, with the mandatory offsetting ensuring CO2 emissions are stabilised at those levels. So airlines won’t actually be offsetting your flight for you – they’ll only be offsetting any emissions over and above the incredibly generous baseline. They’ll only be offsetting their growth as of this point onwards. For the environmentally conscious, it means nothing changes, whatever Mr Gill says – the onus is still on you to buy your own carbon credits on the voluntary market if you want to make sure you’re covered for a flight.
In fact, the goalposts for CORSIA have already been moved: 2020’s air traffic was deemed not to be a sufficient baseline after the mass grounding of flights during the pandemic, so they went with 2019’s emissions instead. And considering how high levels of aviation and related emissions were in 2019 – with almost 40 million flights taking off that year – it could be argued that using this as a baseline is a tad stingy. ‘That reduces the ambition of the scheme to zero,’ as T&E’s Jo Dardenne puts it. ‘And airlines won’t have to pay for offsets for at least five years, until 2027.’ In the meantime, they’re still pumping emissions into the atmosphere with no caps and no payback.
According to Jo, offsetting fundamentally cannot solve aviation’s climate problems:
In principle, offsetting means you’re going on a diet and paying someone else to go to the gym for you. And under the Paris Agreement, every sector needs to reduce as much as possible. We’ve got other sectors trying really hard – aviation can’t just keep coasting.
Specifically, CORSIA doesn’t encourage reducing emissions – you can continue polluting and just pay someone else to reduce instead, so we don’t think the scheme fits in with our targets. We’re focusing on regulators to ensure aviation pollution is reduced, and that means taxing and investing in cleaner fuels.
Gold Standard’s Sarah concurs that we ‘absolutely cannot rely on CORSIA. It’s only taxing growth from 2019, not airlines’ whole emissions. They’re only responsible for offsetting their increase.’
What are airlines doing?
What about individual airlines that are already offsetting flights off their own bat or offering voluntary offsets? It’s a tricky area, and one that’s ripe for accusations of greenwashing, mainly because it’s almost impossible to know exactly which projects are being funded, how much is being paid per carbon credit, and whether the numbers stack up in terms of accounting for fuel being burned at altitude.
EasyJet, for example, says it is using a combination of Gold Standard- and VCS- certified projects to offset every single one of its flights – an admirable achievement. But the first example it gives of a project it’s investing in is ‘forest regeneration’ – the type of scheme I mentioned earlier where you’re essentially paying for a forest not to be destroyed. It’s such a nebulous shoot of offsetting that Gold Standard point blank refuses to certify these types of projects. It’s not to say protecting forests doesn’t have any benefit – of course it does – but the idea that this will make your flight ‘carbon neutral’, as easyJet claims, is simply preposterous.
Mind you, at least they’re playing some kind of active role in offsetting. Most airlines simply link to a voluntary contributions scheme, complete with emissions calculators of varying quality. Some, such as Ryanair, offer customers the option to add on a couple of euros to their flight as a ‘contribution’ towards offsetting projects. As we’ve already seen, there’s no way that €2 is going to legitimately offset your flight. In fact, €2 isn’t going to do much more than ease your conscience. And in February 2020, only 3 per cent of Ryanair passengers were doing it anyway; perhaps indicative of a lack of trust that the money would really have an effect.
Even Dutch carrier KLM, one of the market leaders when it comes to making aviation more sustainable, appears to charge half of what it should for offsets in its voluntary scheme. According to its emissions calculator, an Amsterdam–Bogota round trip produces just over a tonne of CO2 emissions per passenger.15 The price of the offset is €18.58 (slightly less than the £20-a-tonne price we’d expect to pay for a good offset). Type the same journey into the Atmosfair calculator, and it gives the price as €84 for the same journey. On top of the tonne or so of emissions from CO2, it adds on an additional 2.4 tonnes for the additional warming impacts of contrails, ozone formation, etc. – those ‘CO2e’ impacts that were mentioned in chapter 1. It’s clear from this comparison, then, that KLM’s calculator doesn’t take any of the additional warming impacts from flying into account – an issue that’s problematic when it comes to buying carbon credits.
Meanwhile, a joint investigation into the offsetting schemes used by some of the world’s largest airlines carried out by The Guardian and Unearthed, Greenpeace’s investigative arm, found that their credits, generated by various forestry projects, appeared to be based on a ‘flawed and much-criticised system’ and should not be used to back up claims of ‘carbon-neutral flying’.16
Perhaps it’s unsurprising; with the best will in the world, you can’t put your faith in the very industry that is causing the emissions in the first place.
So … should I offset?
While it’s still a small percentage of passengers who are buying offsets, more and more of us are doing it and, if Mark Carney’s right, it’s going to be a $50 billion business by 2030.
Despite the doom and gloom and handwringing of a lot of the above (my sincerest apologies), offsetting schemes aren’t inherently a bad thing – far from it. Like many things in life, they’re only bad when they’re relied upon too much or used irresponsibly.
When it comes to aviation, the real issue is not those people who take a flight every couple of years and diligently offset using a robust scheme – it’s those of us who fly much, much more frequently and think that offsetting truly mitigates our actions (or, in most cases, don’t bother with it at all). It’s airlines using the practice as an excuse not to inhibit growth in any way or heavily invest in developing alternative low-carbon or carbon-neutral fuels.
Even the projects and certifications themselves do not believe offsetting is the answer. ‘Our work ethic is based on the following principle: only compensate what can’t be avoided or reduced,’ says Atmosfair. ‘Offsetting cannot solve the problem of climate change since it does nothing to change the actual source of CO2. It is a necessary second-best solution as long as the best solution does not yet exist. Individual flight passengers are responsible for examining their actions prior to offsetting emissions. For example, sometimes a video conference instead of a business trip suffices, a longer vacation can take the place of two shorter ones.’
It’s the same story I hear from all of the experts I speak to: if you need to fly, offset, but reducing is best. Reduce first, then offset: this is the rule we should apply to every area of our lifestyles in order to live more sustainably. Dr Tyers says:
I do think it should be a last resort. We need to change our behaviour, and the single fastest way to increase your carbon footprint is to fly, while the easiest way to cut your footprint is to fly less or not at all. Anything which diminishes the likelihood of us doing that can be dangerous.
It’s the same guiding principle as the one that applies to industries: that they need to decarbonise as much as is physically possible, and offset what’s left over only after putting the work in.
The reason being that, in theory, if emissions from the Global North were only tackled by offsetting, they would not be lowered enough to reach the targets for 2050 or 2100, according to the IPCC.17
Given that it’s currently such a small market, the people who choose to offset their flights tend to have already considered the necessity of their journey; they’re the ones who are most likely to be doing their bit by cutting back where they can, according to Professor Gössling:
I think it’s a different story when individuals [rather than industries] buy carbon offsets – because they have already considered whether or not they should fly, and they are then trying to bring the best out of the worst. If you buy high quality carbon credits, that can actually make a difference. Given there’s only 1 or 2 per cent of people doing it, we shouldn’t pick at them; they’re probably the ones who have actually thought about whether they need to take their flight in the first place. I think for anyone who has decided to fly, it’s still the better thing to do.
For essential flights then, ones where there’s no alternative, offsetting can be a positive choice. One of the most important things, as we’ve already seen, is to do your research – find a scheme that you trust, that’s certified, that you believe in. If we’re going to use offsetting as a force for good, we have to fight the impulse to use it as a set of blinkers that allows us to disengage from our actions (and our guilt).
All in all, I think I’ve come around to the idea of offsets as a ‘last resort’. The carbon credits market is often presented as something sinister when, in fact, it does a lot of good. It has a bad rep because of the people who don’t use it responsibly – the schemes guilty of double counting or claiming additionality when there is none, the industries using it as a get-out-of-jail-free loophole to indefinitely put off decarbonising (of which aviation is undoubtedly one). And, as we’ll see later, it’s not that the technology doesn’t exist to make zero-carbon flights a reality – on the contrary. But it’s expensive and time-consuming to develop and implement, and airlines currently have little incentive to do so, with no limits put on their emissions or their use of cheap, abundant kerosene.
In the meantime, it’s up to us to weigh up our consumption, to question which journeys by air are essential, to go forth and reduce as much as we can. And then, yes, to offset the flights we can’t do without. It may be like paying someone to go to the gym for you – but at least someone’s working out.