“More than 90% of rainforest carbon offsets by biggest certifier are worthless”. The founding CEO of Verra, the world’s largest standards body for voluntary carbon market will step down in June after 15 years.

Carbon credits or offsets are when companies, governments or people pay for someone else to cut greenhouse gas emissions on their behalf, so they can take credit for this climate action. The purchasing of #carboncredits allows for companies to claim they are “carbon neutral” or “environmentally friendly”. In 2020, about 70% of all credits in the $2 billion voluntary carbon offsetting market were issued by Verra.

Verra has faced intense scrutiny over the integrity of its certification process. In focus was the inaccurate calculations involving forest projects and climate benefit, which form the bulk of Verra’s work. The allegations set that more than 90% of their rainforest offset credits (among the most used by companies) are likely to be “phantom credits”.

The Madre de Dios Amazon project: an example of a Verra project, alongside the reference area used for projecting deforestation rates. The reference area incorporates a road, which will potentially lead to a high rate of deforestation.

These credits were purchased by big corporations such as Gucci, Salesforce, Shell, easyJet and The Walt Disney Company which also put them in the spotlight. The credits enabled some to label their products as carbonneutral, or communicating to their customers that they could eat, dress, or fly without negatively impacting the environment. This raises a number of issues, but it goes without saying that it is not useful for the fight against climate change to have such schemes in place when they prove not to exercise the positive environmental impact they were designed to have.

We note that in parallel, the European Parliament voted to clamp down on carbon neutral claims to fight greenwashing and misleading consumers of sustainable products. Lawmakers introduced a ban on environmental claims based on carbon offsetting schemes, such as “CO2 neutral”, which was not included in the draft proposal yet but remains an interesting development in the future of “carbon neutral” as we currently know it.