Neutralise
Neutralisation – offsetting - is the third step on journey towards arriving at a more harmonious relationship with mother Earth.
Climate Change is a non-localized phenomenon – once released, Greenhouse Gases spread freely and uniformly throughout the atmosphere. This fact is at the crux of the political and economic debates surrounding Climate Change. On the one hand, the dispersive nature of the GHGs gives us tremendous flexibility in planning reduction strategies – reducing GHGs anywhere contributes to overall reduction; but at the same time, it makes assigning responsibility difficult – countries that have historically released the largest volumes of GHGs are not the only ones suffering its effects – in fact the communities most at danger are the ones that are already disadvantaged and most likely contributed negligibly to climatic threat we are facing. In a paradoxical way, this crisis binds together the fate of the entire humanity.
The international response to the climate change threat has historically been spearheaded and coordinated by the United Nations through various meetings, reports and conferences. The negotiation process over the last almost two decades may be summarized as under:
1992
Although the Climate Change phenomenon has been researched since the last few decades, it was at the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development in 1992 in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil - popularly known as the Rio Earth Summit – that the issue came to centre stage. The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) was adopted at this summit. The UNFCCC, for the first time,
- recognises the problem
- sets an ultimate objective of stabilizing greenhouse gas concentrations at a level that would prevent dangerous anthropogenic (human induced) interference with the climate system. over the five-year period 2008-2012.
- requires precise and regularly updated inventories of greenhouse gas emissions from industrialized countries. With a few exceptions, the base year for tabulating greenhouse gas emissions has been set as 1990.
1995
3 years after the Climate Change Convention at Rio, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) published its second major assessment of Climate Change research – the research was significant because it concluded that the climate may already have started responding to past emissions.
1997
The first addition to the UNFCCC, the Kyoto Protocol, was adopted in 1997. The major feature of the Kyoto Protocol is that while the Convention encouraged industrialised countries to stabilize GHG emissions, the Protocol commits them to do so.
Recognizing that developed countries are principally responsible for the current high levels of GHG emissions in the atmosphere as a result of more than 150 years of industrial activity, the Protocol places a heavier burden on developed nations under the principle of “common but differentiated responsibilities". Parties with commitments under the Kyoto Protocol (Annex B Parties) have accepted targets for limiting or reducing emissions. These amount to an average of five per cent against 1990 levels over the five-year period 2008-2012.
The other important outcome of the Protocol was the so-called “Kyoto mechanisms" that offer the industrialized countries three additional means of meeting their targets by way of market-based mechanisms (defined later).
The Kyoto Protocol was adopted in Kyoto, Japan, on 11 December 1997 and entered into force on 16 February 2005.
2001
The detailed rules for the implementation of the Kyoto Protocol were adopted at the 7th Conference of Parties (COP 7) in Marrakesh in 2001, and are called the “Marrakesh Accords".
2009
The 15th Conference of Parties was held in Copenhagen in December 2009. With the first commitment period under the Kyoto period ending in 2012, this meeting was supposed to make way for a new climate protocol. Ministers and officials from 192 countries took part in the Copenhagen meeting. However, the meet ended without a legally binding pact. 25 parties including US, India, South Africa and China, negotiated a ‘political accord’, which was, however, not “adopted" by the Summit
Kyoto Mechanisms
The Kyoto mechanisms announced at the end of the Kyoto Summit laid down, for the first time, mechanisms and rules for “offsetting" GHGs. By paying someone else to absorb or avoid the release of a tonne of CO2 elsewhere, the purchaser of a carbon offset can aim to compensate for or, in principle, “offset" their own emissions. The Kyoto Mechanisms are:
- Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) allows a country with an emission-reduction or emission-limitation commitment under the Kyoto Protocol to implement an emission-reduction project in developing countries. Such projects can earn saleable certified emission reduction (CER) credits, each equivalent to one tonne of CO2, which can be counted towards meeting Kyoto targets. A CDM project activity might involve, for example, a rural electrification project using solar panels or the installation of more energy-efficient boilers.
- Joint Implementation (JI) allows a country with an emission reduction or limitation commitment under the Kyoto Protocol (Annex B Party) to earn emission reduction units (ERUs) from an emission-reduction or emission removal project in another Annex B Party, each equivalent to one tonne of CO2, which can be counted towards meeting its Kyoto target. Joint implementation offers Parties a flexible and cost-efficient means of fulfilling a part of their Kyoto commitments, while the host Party benefits from foreign investment and technology transfer.
- Emissions trading allows countries that have emission units to spare - emissions permitted them but not used - to sell this excess capacity to countries that are over their targets, thus, a new commodity was created in the form of emission reductions or removals. Since carbon dioxide is the principal greenhouse gas, people speak simply of trading in carbon. Carbon is now tracked and traded like any other commodity. This is known as the ocarbon market. Thus, CERs generated through CDM Projects and ERUs generated through JI Projects, in addition to other kinds of Carbon currencies, may be traded in the Carbon Market.
Voluntary and Compliance Markets for Carbon Trading
Carbon offset markets exist both under compliance schemes and as voluntary programs.
Compliance markets are created and regulated by mandatory regional, national, and international carbon reduction regimes, such as the Kyoto Protocol and the European Union’s Emissions Trading Scheme.Voluntary offset markets function outside of the compliance markets and enable companies and individuals to purchase carbon offsets on a voluntary basis
The Kyoto Mechanisms defined the first global, environmental investment and credit scheme of its kind, providing standardized emissions offset instruments, CERs and ERUs - mechanisms to stimulate sustainable development and emission reductions, while giving industrialized countries some flexibility in how they meet their emission reduction or limitation targets. Carbon offset markets, in general, have the potential to be an important part of the solution to the climate crisis because of their economic and environmental efficiency and their potential to deliver sustainability co-benefits through technology transfer and capacity building. The voluntary carbon market enables those in unregulated sectors or countries that have not ratified Kyoto, to offset their emissions. However, the implementation – and the spirit – of offsetting has often been waylaid by other interests and offsetting Projects have been criticized for various reasons such as lack of transparency, quality assurance and, as an easy way for “Climate Sinners" to pay off their sins without making any behavioural changes.
Neutralisation - offsetting - is the third step on the journey towards arriving at a more harmonious relationship with mother Earth. At no2co2, Neutralisation is considered as an option only after all attempts have been made to reduce Footprint through domestic action. While we realise that offsetting should not be the easy way out to atone for our climatic sins, properly implemented, it is a powerful idea for bringing about social change in a participative manner.
The critiques of offsetting projects and our plans to work around them:
- The principle of additionality states that only those projects that to qualify as an Offsetting Project, the Project should be Additional to the business-as-usual operations of an organisation. In other words, in the absence of a market for the offsets, the projects would not have happened. However, frequently projects that would have happened anyway get registered as offsetting projects, thereby not resulting in any net reduction in GHG emissions.
Our response – identifying implementation partners that would not have been able to implement such projects in the absence of external funds to put them in place. - The principle of co-benefits – co-benefits are social and environmental benefits that go beyond the greenhouse gas (GHG) reduction benefits of a project. These may include improved local air quality, improved bio-diversity, job creation etc. Again frequently ignored in many offsetting projects
our response – identifying implementation partners who have been working in a society even outside the scope of the offsetting projects towards other socio-economic benefits
The distribution of the benefits – in a traditional offsetting project, the benefits from the sale of offsets, and the ability to participate in the emerging Carbon market, goes to established players – industries and brokers, and keeps the marginal players out.
our response – Use offsetting projects to stimulate social and technological innovation. Identifying socially powerful projects that can transform the socio-economic realities of the grassroots organizations and civic communities that will be equal stakeholders in these offsetting.
