It has been determined that at least 90% of carbon credits do not meet the methodological criteria to be considered reliable. What does the future look like for these?
This weekend I was watching a debate at Oxford University on the future of carbon credits, in the face of the reputational crisis in which this market finds itself, as it has been found that most of the bonds do not meet the methodological criteria to be considered reliable, more than 90%.
Currently more than 95% of credits come from avoided emissions, not directly from removals. Removals mean that there is a sequestration of carbon that was previously in the atmosphere, while avoided emissions credits are for the cessation of activities that could generate new carbon in the atmosphere.
To balance the emissions of our productive system, it is imperative that more and more removals are made, as these are the ones that really capture new carbon in the atmosphere. The imperative need for the carbon market to move from avoided emissions to removals is evident to all those who have paid attention to the accounts on how to reach the net zero sought by the Paris Agreement, to achieve a livable world.
Now, what would it mean to cultivate a removals-based and reliable carbon market? It is argued that this means that for that we would have to move to heavy industrial technologies to achieve it, such as air carbon capture and factory carbon capture and storage, as the storage of these is considered to have much greater permanence. This is a harsh criticism of the carbon market as it has been known so far, which is based on nature-based solutions.
The argument is: for a carbon credit to truly offset an emission, it would need to remain in the atmosphere for thousands of years, which is impossible to ensure through nature-based solutions. This puts the countries of the global south, especially those of us who consider the services of our nature as a potential source of capital, in a tricky situation.
Scientific and technical knowledge, as well as the main investments in the field of permanent removals are being made from the most industrialized countries of the global north. Thus, just as companies from industrialized countries have dominated the international trade scenario, if the academic community's recommendations on shifting to long-term removals are followed, it seems that the beneficiaries may once again be these same countries, further contributing to the North/South divide.
The countries of the South will increasingly have to focus on the other services provided by our nature and not only the carbon captured. I recommend that we move away from overly ideological positions on the morality of carbon credits to demand that cutting-edge carbon capture technologies do not deepen the world's current inequalities and that we too have access to them.
