Carbon Offsetting - friend or foe?

Thoughts from Commissioner Hugh Raven

Hugh

With climate change so high among public concerns, carbon neutrality and carbon offsetting are increasingly in the news. But in our rush to go green, there are serious doubts about whether we even fully understand the meaning of these terms – still less how to put them into practice.

Many of the UK’s biggest businesses see potential gains in being carbon neutral, including Marks and Spencer and Tesco. M & S gained much media coverage when they launched their ‘eco-plan’ this year, aptly named Plan A (‘there is no plan B’) – committing it to carbon neutrality by 2012. The previous Scottish administration stated the same aim. What does this really mean? And will it really make a difference to climate change?

Most claims from business and the public sector about carbon reduction involve carbon offsetting - the purchase of carbon savings made elsewhere, often in developing countries. Offsetting is a boom industry with new companies springing up each year to offset everything from nappies to mini-breaks.

Who can we trust? And is offsetting a good thing in the first place?

A recent Channel 4 Dispatches programme investigated poor offsetting arrangements by some businesses and even questioned the whole process. Duncan McLaren of Friends of the Earth Scotland recently said "Carbon offsetting is more about salving one's conscience than solving the problem of climate change".

If this process is to enjoy public support and credibility, it must be fully transparent.

To explore these issues further, we in the Sustainable Development Commission Scotland recently convened a workshop with key figures from the Scottish Executive, Government Agencies, NGO’s, and consultants working in the field.

Good practice for carbon management, such as the use of carbon balance sheets, and issues of trust and public confidence, were the key themes of the day. The main conclusion was that offsetting does have a role to play – but only after much more rigorous measures on saving energy and efficient use. Offsetting should only be used once emissions have been reduced as far as possible.

The SDC plans to pursue this work. It’s too important for Scotland not to get it right.
We need to know that when a Scottish body claims it’s carbon neutral, all possible steps have been taken to reduce energy consumption, that offsetting was not seen as the easy fix, and that the offset made real cuts in carbon added to the atmosphere - that is, it was not a project that would have happened anyway.

Only then can the public trust claims of carbon neutrality – and Scotland’s path towards a low-emission economy be measured.

Click to view a summary of our conversation.