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 Certification Standard?
The Certification 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.
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Note that we also have a short checklist version of this manual that highlights the most important pieces of what we’re presenting here.
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It’s okay if you can’t answer all of the questions below. Our goal here is to equip you with the tools to ask better questions and gather better information about carbon credit projects to help you weed out the great from the good. There are likely to be good projects out there that can’t answer all the questions we’ve outlined below, and we’ve done our best to indicate a few of the topic areas that we think might be a bit more challenging for you to uncover.
These five parameters are commonly used to evaluate a carbon credit’s emission reduction performance: Permanence, Additionality, Verifiability, Enforceability and Realness. Asking questions about these factors will help you better understand where there could be quality strengths or risks associated with a credit project.
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. The longer and more stable a project’s permanence is, the more likely it is to have a long-term impact on climate.
Permanence can be tricky to forecast because we can’t predict human behavior for the next 100 years, let alone map out specific environmental risks that could impact a project (like wildfires impacting forest growth). There are a number of variables that can affect project permanence, including social, political and environmental risks. Therefore, when evaluating project permanence, it’s important to think about the broader context around the project, such as the inherent value it provides to local communities, and what potential risks could affect project performance.
Questions for your carbon providers: