Can We Fix Carbon Offsets?
- Media Manager
- Sep 24, 2023
- 2 min read
TIME
Written By: Alejandro de La Garza
Published: September 25th, 2023
Corporations, startups, and nonprofits invested in the idea of offsetting emissions by preserving natural landscapes and planting trees have a problem. In recent months, media reports from outlets like Bloomberg and The Guardian have questioned many prominent players in the sector of overstating the purported carbon benefits of projects intending to use natural systems to compensate for human emissions. That, in turn, has increasingly called into question the validity of net zero claims from major polluters based on those kinds of offsets.
Some researchers and green advocates have called the entire practice a form of greenwashing, or an effort to cover up continued pollution. Fortescue, a major mining company based in Australia, has gone so far as to declare that it will cease using carbon offsets, instead focusing on direct emissions cuts within their operations to meet their climate goals.
Kelly Kizzier, Director of Corporate Action and Markets at the Bezos Earth Fund, is an influential voice in the offset space. She sat down with TIME in Manhattan during New York Climate Week.
Does that mean there needs to be a shift away from describing those investments in nature as literally offsetting corporate emissions, and instead describe them in terms of positive benefits for local ecosystems and that sort of thing?
What we find is we can unlock literally billions of dollars of investment if the [investment] vehicle has high quality, if it counts towards climate goals, and if it can achieve impact at scale. So I think as long as the system and the standards we are setting out achieve those three things to unlock that investment that we so critically need, we can be innovative.
