UnEarth Magazine.

Words by Siena Keijsers, Art by Holly Brown.

The Economist heralds carbon offsetting as “essential to tackling climate change”, and key initiative for our fight against climate change. Carbon offsetting involves companies or governments financing emission reduction schemes, typically in the Global South, to compensate for their own carbon footprint. Schemes usually relate to afforestation, forest conservation, the distribution of energy-efficient technology and the funding of renewable energy projects. Carbon offsetting is praised for providing corporations and governments the opportunity to easily fund, and claim, carbon-neutrality; it appears a useful strategy to contain the climate crisis. 

Unfortunately, carbon offsetting is environmentally ineffective. ClimatePartner attests that “carbon offsetting allows for immediate action against climate change”. This assertion is simply false. Trees require up to 20 years to capture the volume of carbon dioxide offsetting schemes promise. Not only is afforestation a delayed solution, it is also only temporary. If trees do survive threats of droughts, wildfires, and disease, they eventually die from old age, and the carbon they stored returns to the atmosphere via decomposition. Conservation projects are equally impermanent. For example, in a ‘conserved’ area in Cambodia, Angdoung Bor, forest cover decreased from 90% to 0% over the duration of the project. So, despite marketing from the Global North, secure carbon extracted as fossil fuels does not equate to the volatile carbon stored in forests. Whilst afforestation and conservation play a critical role in our struggle against global warming, they are not substitutes for minimising fossil fuel usage. Especially as emission-reduction estimates for carbon offsetting projects are usually overly generous. For instance, the Guardian found that 90% of rainforest carbon offsets delivered by Verra, the biggest carbon credit provider in the world, are worthless. Corporations including Shell, Disney, EasyJet, Leon, and Gucci have labelled products as ‘carbon neutral’ based on these superficial carbon credits.  

Not only is carbon offsetting environmentally ineffective, it is also socially unjust. Carbon offsetting feeds into the Global North’s focus on technocratic solutions. This deterministic, strictly environmental framing of the crisis reduces climate change to a technical issue solvable by scientific developments. This approach disregards the social context of climate change in which imperialism played a lead role. Carbon offsetting reproduces imperial dynamics by satisfying the concerns of the Global North irrespective of community interests in the Global South. Despite Indigenous peoples conserving 80% of remaining global biodiversity, carbon offsetting projects often infringe on Indigenous peoples’ rights. For instance, Verra endangered critical resources for Indigenous groups in Northern Kenya, namely the Samburu, Maasai, Borana and Rendille people, by disturbing their traditional farming practices. Verra prohibited these groups from grazing their animals along traditional migration routes which follow rain patterns during seasonal droughts. Instead Verra forced livestock to remain inside a specific project area, degrading land and endangering food security in the process. Evidently, carbon offsetting allows the Global North to preserve their crisis-inducing behaviour whilst transferring responsibility to the Global South. This transfer of responsibility is particularly unjust as the Global South is especially innocent in regard to global warming; the entire continent of Africa is responsible for 3.8% of global emissions, whilst the USA is responsible for 19% of global emissions.  

Ultimately, polluting in one area and compensating in another is not actually doing anything to mitigate against climate change! Carbon offsetting cannot be marketed as a solution to global warming because it merely preserves convention. It does not restrict demand for fossil fuels, instead it provides an escape-route for individuals seeking to assuage guilt or companies pursuing a sustainable image. It functions as a form of greenwashing, allowing companies to evade responsibility by concealing their unsustainable behaviour with performative ‘eco-friendly’ projects. Accordingly, carbon offsetting is counterproductive, it fails to challenge the root-cause of climate change, substantiating the status quo in the process. To permanently solve the climate crisis companies cannot simply compensate for emissions, they must actively restrict them.