Does offsetting work?

Is offsetting your emissions simply greenwashing or a win for the environment?

ABC Science – By Bernie Hobbs and environment reporter Nick Kilvert

There are a range of offset projects designed to remove carbon from the atmosphere.

Can you really pay someone to remove enough CO2 from the atmosphere to counter what your actions are putting into it?

The carbon offset programs offered by Qantas, Jetstar and Virgin are all certified by the government-backed Climate Active program. According to a spokesperson from Climate Active, that means they pass some essential criteria. Qantas and Virgin have undertaken a comprehensive life cycle assessment (LCA) of energy usage in flight and on the ground,” the spokesperson said. “The airlines apply a functional unit to passengers and their travel to give a total footprint which is offset with eligible offsets.” What that means in practice is that if you pay the $0.95 offset fee for an economy seat on a flight from Sydney to Melbourne, then 71kg of carbon dioxide (your share of the emissions from the flight) are removed from the atmosphere somewhere else.

So what does that “somewhere else” look like?

Offsetting stacks up

There are nearly 800 carbon offset projects across Australia.

One of them is the Yarra Yarra Biodiversity Corridor, where more than 29 million native trees have been planted in south-western Western Australia. By reforesting thousands of hectares of habitat for threatened species, nearly 2 million tonnes of CO2 will be removed from the atmosphere and protected for 100 years, according to project leaders Carbon Neutral.

A draft report into that project has found the co-benefits — employment, ecosystem services — are worth more than the carbon sequestration, according to CEO Ray Wilson. “Last study we found 54 bird species, and we’re looking at employing more Indigenous people,” Mr Wilson said.

Given the increasingly steep rate needed to reduce our carbon dioxide emissions in order to keep warming below 1.5 and even 2 degrees Celsius, Mr Wilson believes offsetting is necessary. “A lot of us are making efforts to reduce our footprint as households and some governments. But if we go totally renewable for our power there will still be a mass of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere,” he said. “I just don’t think we can reach our [emissions reduction] targets without offsetting.”

Other projects include fire management in Arnhem Land, ecosystem regeneration in New South Wales, as well as working with farmers to improve beef herd management and reduce methane emissions, soil-carbon sequestration, and developing solar and wind farms and battery storage

This carbon accounting and offsetting is also independently audited and certified through a third party validation, according to Climate Active. The Yarra Yarra Biodiversity Corridor project for instance, is a certified Gold Standard project. Gold Standard is a certification body established by WWF and other NGO partners to ensure carbon reduction schemes feature the “highest levels of environmental integrity”.

So the certification program and its independent third party auditing means that in carbon-accounting terms, offsetting stacks up.

But too few of us are doing it

Only 1 per cent of Australians opt to offset their flights. And that extremely low rate means we barely make a dint in our aviation emissions. So can offsetting be the answer to getting our future (post-COVID) aviation emissions down? Most major airlines think it is.

Under the Carbon Offsetting and Reduction Scheme for International Aviation (CORSIA), international airlines are committing to capping emissions at 2020 levels and reaching net zero emissions by 2050.

And their key mechanism to achieve that is by offsetting emissions.

According to a Qantas spokesperson, Qantas is “meeting our commitments of capping emissions at 2020 levels and reaching net zero emissions by 2050”. “Qantas is matching dollar-for-dollar every contribution a customer makes to offset their emissions on a passenger flight, effectively doubling the program.”

So offsetting is the answer?

Biological carbon cycles move carbon between the earth and the atmosphere in relatively short periods. For example, trees absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, storing it as carbon throughout their lives. When the tree dies and decomposes or burns, the stored carbon is released back into the atmosphere as carbon dioxide.

That cycle can span from a few years to several centuries. However, the carbon stored in fossil fuels has taken millions of years to sequester. By extracting and burning these fuels, we are transferring geological carbon into the biological carbon cycle.

Eliminating all the geological CO2 we’ve released into the atmosphere will take millions of years due to the slow nature of geological processes.

Alan Pears, a senior industry fellow at RMIT, dedicates much of his time to calculating emissions and admits he’s “a bit obsessed.” He even gifts offsets to family and friends during Christmas. Pears emphasizes that while the primary goal should be to avoid emissions altogether, offsets can play a valuable role during the energy transition period. “People argue that using offsets is merely buying your way out of guilt,” Pears said. “However, very few people are in a position to lead a completely carbon-neutral lifestyle.”