Another extremely important but often overlooked aspect of the
voluntary carbon market is the amount of
co-benefits a project can have beyond climate
mitigation. Natural ecosystems can provide a wide range of other social
and environmental benefits, including biodiversity. These
so-called
co-benefits are usually
evaluated through the lens of the UN Sustainable Development
Goals (SDGs).
All of our nature-based projects
support multiple SDGs and are
certified by the Verified Carbon Standard (VCS) and/or the Gold Standard. This means that they're all subject
to an independent audit by both qualified independent third
parties and VCS/GS staff to ensure that standards are met and
methodologies are properly applied.
They're
also certified by the
CCB Standard, which
quantifies and audits their impact on the climate, the
community and the biodiversity around them. We only select
nature-based projects with the best results in each area.
However,
these certifying entities and their Standards have evolved as
the market has matured. Today, many projects that succeeded to
get certified in the past don't have the level of quality
that we should be aiming to achieve.
About two thirds
of all
certified carbon credits
from
VCS and Gold Standard
come from
renewable energy projects (e.g., construction of a solar plant) or
energy efficiency projects
(e.g., improved cooking stoves). While these types of projects
were audited and certified as "additional" in the
past—we'll go over what that means in a minute—renewable
energy has become so efficient in the past few years that
their additionality claims have become unjustifiable.
For
this reason, even though a nature-based project being approved
by VCS or Gold Standard is necessary for us to consider
implementing it into our portfolio, it's definitely
not sufficient. We
conduct our
own independent research
on each and every project to verify that
eight conditions are all
not only met, but also fulfilled in a vastly superior way than
the rest of projects out there.
