Carbon offsetting could give people a license to pollute the environment. If a person buys carbon offsets, they can pollute the environment without trying to mitigate their emissions.
The carbon-offsetting process faces several challenges, including the quantification of carbon benefits and verification that a party’s greenhouse gas reduction is indeed occurring.
To be effective, a carbon offset must be additional—that is, the project must reduce greenhouse gas emissions more than would have occurred in the absence of the offset. The carbon benefits of each project need to be determined relative to what would have occurred under a business-as-usual scenario. Also, the permanence of the emission-reduction project needs to be taken into account.
E.g., a tree planted in one year to offset carbon should not be removed in the future. Carbon offset projects can also create leakage, where a project causes impacts that unintentionally increase emissions elsewhere, such as when deforestation is simply relocated rather than avoided.
Bloci overcomes these issues by only using UK carbon offsets from verifiable and quantifiable sources and records every transaction on a Blockchain ledger so that each kg of carbon offset can only be used once.
February 14, 2023
