With more carbon projects entering the market and ongoing efforts to improve integrity standards, it's crucial to carefully evaluate the projects behind the carbon credits you purchase.
We’ve created this checklist to equip you to ask better questions and collect better data from your credit providers. It’s okay if you can’t answer every question. Our goal is for you to leave feeling informed and confident with your purchase, and to send a signal to brokers and project developers that buyers are interested in the details behind their purchases.
There are eight parameters in this screening checklist. The first five are widely accepted factors for measuring a carbon credit’s emission reduction performance: Permanence, Additionality, Verifiability, Enforceability and Realness. We also include Data transparency, Community engagement, and Co-benefits on our list of non-carbon screening priorities. Below, we explain each of these variables and provide some questions you can ask your credit providers.
How is this checklist different from the the Certification Standard?
The Standard is in place to ensure your credits meet international verification requirements, show proof of retirement, and reduce the riskiness associated with project types, locations and vintage years. This checklist gives you an added layer of risk reduction. If you use it, it will help you better understand your project’s carbon performance and risks, and allow you to select projects based on data transparency, community engagement and co-benefits. You can refer to our longer screening priorities manual for a deeper dive into each of these parameters, where you’ll find additional guidance on how to evaluate the answers you receive to these checklist questions.
Asking questions about these factors will help you better understand where there could be credit strengths or risks.
Permanence: Permanence measures how long carbon will be avoided or removed from the atmosphere because of a credit project. What does this mean? If the permanence boundary for a reforestation project is 100 years, any new forest cover planted must remain intact for at least 100 years. This helps ensure the new carbon benefits are not immediately lost. Most projects at least guarantee permanence for the lifespan of the project.
Additionality: Additionality measures whether carbon benefits would have accrued in the absence of a carbon credit project or not. This means you can be confident that your dollars are paying for behavior changes that will avoid or remove tonnes of carbon. When asking questions about a project’s additionality, try to understand the context behind what makes this project different from existing behavior.