Associate Professor Gregory TRENCHER and JSPS Research Fellow Jordan CARLSON, both in the Department of Environmental Education, collaborated with researchers from EPFL Switzerland and the University of Hamburg to analyze the quality of offsets (carbon offsets) used by the 20 largest corporate buyers in the world. They investigated the quality of each company’s offsets to determine whether they have a credible decarbonization effect. The results of the study were published in Nature Communications in August this year.
The team evaluated whether the offsets purchased by each company met industry standards and indicators of high quality in terms of the decarbonization risks, the age of offset projects and credits, the country in which the offset projects were implemented, and the credit price.
The results revealed that all companies purchased mainly low-quality offsets. These results suggest that in order to accelerate effective corporate decarbonization, it is critical that companies aim to phase-out fossil fuels within their own supply chains through capital investments and business model reforms, without relying on offsets.
In the future, Associate Professor Trencher and his colleagues will focus on the development of the “carbon removal” market, seen by many as a silver bullet to overcome the problems in the offset market for decarbonization. They plan to conduct research to clarify how major companies are utilizing carbon removal offsets to accelerate decarbonization.
For more information, please see the link below.
Article in Nature Communications
Press release by Kyoto University