The voluntary market for carbon credits – separate from cap-and-trade markets regulated by governments – has grown slowly over the last few years, hobbled by loose definitions and lax credit verification. A recent peer-reviewed study of more than 2,000 carbon-credit projects found that only 16% of the projects achieved the carbon savings claimed.

Growth in this market could ramp up significantly, however, after the Conference of Parties (COP29) meeting in Baku, Azerbaijan, approved a framework for recognizing carbon credits in the global accounting of carbon emissions. For the first time, carbon credits will be recognized under the Paris Agreement, enabling countries and companies to use offsets to meet their carbon-reduction targets, potentially giving a huge boost to carbon-credit trading.

The International Emissions Trading Association estimates a carbon market under Paris Agreement rules could save as much as US$250 billion per year by 2030 in mitigation costs, far larger than the savings under the current market.

“We have ended a decade-long wait and unlocked a critical tool for keeping 1.5 degrees in reach,” said COP29 President Mukhtar Babayev.

Environmental Defense Fund, a U.S. group advocating market-based solutions to climate change, cautiously praised the deal. “While its true impact will hinge on strong implementation that delivers measurable benefits for people and nature, this agreement represents a historic opportunity to elevate carbon markets as a tool for meaningful climate action.”

But some critics said that nothing of substance was achieved in Azerbaijan since the existing carbon market system remains. They fear the market will grow quickly, providing an inexpensive and easy way for emitters to meet their climate pledges without doing the hard and expensive work of reducing their greenhouse gas emissions.

The COP29 guidelines will create “cowboy carbon markets at a time when the world needs a sheriff,” said Carbon Market Watch, an international advocacy group.

Persistent skepticism for carbon credits

Carbon credits are certificates issued by projects like reforestation or renewable-energy ventures for emissions avoided, reduced or removed. The certificates are purchased by large or hard-to-abate emitters like oil companies or airlines in order to offset their own emissions.

One of the big problems with the COP29 agreement is that there are no standards for what constitutes a quality carbon credit. Renewable-energy projects, for example, have sometimes been credited with generating “avoided emissions” even though the projects have resulted in no measurable emission reductions because the projects would have been built regardless of the credit. The Integrity Council for the Voluntary Carbon Market – a private organization – recently rejected renewables for its carbon-credit standard.

The fact that nations can set their own standards in country-to-country deals is a large loophole in the COP29 pact, making it “the biggest threat to the Paris Agreement,” Oxford University researcher Injy Johnstone told AFP (Agence France-Presse).

At least one major international bank, HSBC, is voting with its feet. Only days before COP29 approved the carbon agreement, the bank shut down plans to launch a major carbon trading desk, according to Bloomberg. The shutdown is a sign that buyers and traders have cooled on carbon offsets. Delta Airlines, Google and EasyJet are among a growing list of companies that have abandoned carbon-offset purchases, focusing instead on work to reduce their own emissions.

Do offsets still have a role in reducing emissions?

The Science Based Targets initiative (SBTi), widely viewed as the gold standard for corporate carbon-reduction plans, recently expressed skepticism that carbon credits should be used by companies to offset their emissions.

SBTi has announced it will hold a consultation in 2025 on a new Corporate Net-Zero Standard, which is expected to include guidelines on how corporations can use carbon offsets to support their net-zero targets. SBTi’s final standard is expected to play a large role in establishing international guidelines for carbon-offset buyers.

While COP29 rushed through its carbon market framework, a related COP conference on biodiversity in Cali, Colombia, took a go-slow approach to the development of a similar market in nature-protection credits. A proposed framework presented at the conference would exclude trading of so-called biodiversity credits on secondary markets. If implemented, this exclusion would limit global trading in biodiversity credits.

“Global offsetting in biodiversity doesn’t work and we don’t support it,” said Amelia Fawcett, co-chair of the U.K./France-led International Advisory Panel on Biodiversity Credits, which unveiled the proposed framework. She told the conference that nature credits should be used only in a very limited way, in local situations to offset harm in the same ecological ecosystem where the credit is traded.

An Lambrechts, a biodiversity expert at Greenpeace, said that development of carbon and biodiversity credits should be linked at next year’s COP climate meeting in Brazil. “At COP30 in Belém, in the Amazon, it’s time to connect the climate and biodiversity fights together.”

Correction: An earlier version of this article misstated the IETA’s estimate of mitigation cost savings. 

Eugene Ellmen writes on sustainable business and finance. He is a former executive director of the Canadian Social Investment Organization (now the Responsible Investment Association).

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In a major study of carbon offsets released July 30, the Science Based Targets initiative (SBTi) found that offsets are ineffective at climate mitigation and represent a risk to climate finance and the net-zero transition.

This almost certainly means that companies relying on carbon offsets to claim significant reductions in their carbon dioxide emissions will be ineligible to receive the coveted net-zero certification from SBTi.

The report and an accompanying discussion paper could further deepen troubles in the carbon-offset market, estimated at $2 billion, an amount considered far below its future potential. But with huge pressures on companies to claim lower carbon emissions, including those from carbon offsets, SBTi’s stance could also cause many companies to look to other corporate climate certifiers.

The evidence on carbon offsets challenges “the legitimacy of offsetting claims, arguing that treating carbon credits as fungible with other sources, sinks or reductions of emissions is inadvisable, illogical or damaging to global mitigation goals,” the report says, adding that corporate claims of “carbon neutrality” through carbon offsets are mired in confusion and disagreement.

The discussion paper outlines SBTi’s thinking on how corporations should deal with end-use, or Scope 3, emissions, which represent about 75% of an average company’s emissions.

The discussion paper’s language is at times ambiguous, leaving open the possibility for permitting offsets, but the overall message is that SBTi wants companies to decrease their own emissions rather than relying on carbon offsets. “The SBTi believes that direct decarbonization must remain the priority for corporate climate action,” Alberto Carrillo Pineda, SBTi’s chief technical officer, said in a statement.

There have been numerous problems with carbon offsets – which are bought and sold by companies and financial institutions as a carbon-reduction mechanism – and many have collapsed under greenwashing allegations. One of the most common problems – a point reflected in the SBTi report – is that offset projects very often fail to create additional CO2 reductions beyond emissions that would have been avoided, sequestered or removed regardless of the offset.

SBTi ‘back on track’

Thomas Day, an analyst with the New Climate Institute think tank, welcomed the SBTi report and discussion paper. “We have often criticized the SBTi for drifting too far from its science-based mantra,” he told Reuters. “But the papers published today stick to the science in ruling out offsets and exploring improvements to the standard, putting the SBTi back on track to remain relevant for company transformation.”

SBTi, a non-profit supported by the Bezos Earth Fund and other funders, is the world’s leading agency certifying corporate climate-change reports. It certified the climate plans of 4,200 companies by the end of 2023, double the number from 2022. Investors and regulators consider it the gold standard in assessing the validity of corporate climate plans.

RELATED:

• How to fix the broken carbon-offset system
• World’s largest companies are buying ‘largely worthless’ carbon credits from rainforest
• ‘Carbon neutral’ and ‘net-zero’ claims face global greenwash crackdown

Certified companies must demonstrate that their climate targets and plans are in line with the science-based goals of the Paris Agreement, limiting global warming to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels.

The discussion paper will go out to consultation and will form the basis of an update to SBTi’s Corporate Net-Zero Standard, the basic guideline for its certification. A draft standard is expected to be released later this year and finalized next year.

The report and discussion paper clarified weeks of confusion after the SBTi board said in April that it would permit companies to claim carbon offsets as a way to reduce Scope 3 emissions, reversing the agency’s traditional policy against the use of offsets for all but 10% of a corporation’s emissions.

Bloomberg reported that the April statement was motivated by pressure from some funders and board members who want the carbon-offset market to grow. The board later walked back its statement after a public outcry from some stakeholders, including its own staff. SBTi’s CEO, Luiz Amaral, resigned in early July, citing personal reasons.

The pressure on the SBTi board came from the Bezos Earth Fund and advisers to former U.S. climate envoy John Kerry, both of which pushed SBTi to accept offsets. Kerry had argued that developing countries could raise billions of dollars for climate mitigation efforts by selling offsets attached to their significant carbon-sequestration assets like rainforests, a view shared by many of those nations, including 10 West African countries that appealed to SBTi to support offsets.

The Biden administration continues to hold this position, recently issuing guidelines for carbon offsets. However, the U.S. guidelines represent a tall order for the offset market; namely, that offsets should provide additional CO2 reductions that wouldn’t otherwise be available and that companies should focus on carbon reductions within their own supply chains before resorting to offsets.

The future of the offsets market

The disrepute that many offset projects have brought to the market combined with SBTi’s rejection would suggest that carbon offsets will fade away under corporate and stakeholder disinterest.

But there are still powerful forces calling for an expansion in the market, not the least of which are large banks hoping to profit from growing carbon-market activity. As well, with production of oil and gas accelerating, many companies in energy and other sectors are looking to offsets to claim lower CO2 emissions. In response, the Integrity Council for the Voluntary Carbon Market was established in 2021 to develop a carbon-offsets standard.

This could pose a threat to SBTi.

Tommy Ricketts, CEO and co-founder of BeZero Carbon (a London-based for-profit carbon-rating company), said that SBTi’s anti-offsets stance could chase some companies away from using it to certify their climate plans. “The focus on technical offsetting alone ignores so much of what’s happening in the carbon market and the ways in which carbon credits positively contribute to the planet and to communities,” he said. “I expect the trend of companies leaving SBTi to accelerate in the next 12 months.”

By digging in on high-integrity CO2 plans, SBTi is hoping to raise the bar on climate mitigation. But this could prompt many companies to take the opposite approach, chasing lower-cost, easily accessible offsets to avoid the expensive and onerous task of reducing their own supply chain emissions.

_

SBTi sent Corporate Knights the following statement following publication:

The decision to examine the potential role of carbon credits was not driven by BEF or any other donor. It reflected requests from a wide range of civil society organisations and businesses from all sides of the conversation. Our donors have made a critical contribution to SBTi’s work which has resulted in thousands of businesses validating their targets through our processes. However, they have not defined how we conducted our research or its objectives. Consistent with our policies, they have not had any input into the papers we have published this month and will not influence the scientific process ahead – and nor would they want to.

_

Eugene Ellmen writes on sustainable business and finance. He is a former executive director of the Canadian Social Investment Organization (now the Responsible Investment Association).

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Back in 1986, an ecologist on a research trip to Fiji reportedly coined the term “greenwashing” in an essay critiquing a beachfront resort’s towel reuse policy. Four decades later, greenwashed marketing claims, did not, it turns out, come out in the wash. They’ve permeated nearly every product category, from “carbon neutral” burgers and disposable cola bottles made with “plastic from the sea” to net-zero oil companies and ESG labels slapped on trillions of dollars in poorly regulated investment funds.

But the Wild West era may be coming to an end. As The Atlantic put it in March, “The world is finally cracking down on ‘greenwashing.’”

On May 11, the European Parliament voted to ban carbon-neutral claims that are based on carbon-offsetting schemes. At the same time, the U.K.’s Advertising Standards Authority also said it would begin stricter enforcement of “unqualified” carbon-neutral, nature-positive and net-zero claims; companies will now have to prove that offsets, which have come under heavy fire, are effective. Meanwhile, Gucci dropped the use of the term “carbon neutral” from its website this spring. EasyJet and JetBlue backed away from carbon offsetting schemes in December.

“Climate-related claims have been shown to be particularly prone to being unclear and ambiguous, misleading the consumer,” EU Environment Commissioner Virginijus Sinkevičius told The Guardian. “We need to set things straight for consumers and give them full information.”

In North America, both agencies in charge of overseeing marketing claims are retooling their approaches. For the first time in a decade, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is revamping its Green Guides, guidelines for environmental advertising and labelling claims. The FTC first published the Green Guides back in 1992 to “help marketers avoid making misleading environmental claims,” which had flourished.

The agency only issues greenwashing fines every few years. In 2022 the FTC went after Walmart and Kohl’s for deceptively marketing rayon bedding, clothing and towels as being “eco-friendly and “made from bamboo” (the U.S. Textile and Wool Act requires that they be labelled as “made with rayon,” since bamboo is converted to rayon using hazardous air-polluting chemicals). The companies agreed to pay the FTC US$3 and $2.5 million, respectively, in penalties. Now environmental and consumer groups want the agency to go after a wider array of claims, including plastic companies claiming that their “advanced” and “chemical” recycling methods are sustainable, as well as financial products purporting to be net-zero or “Paris aligned.”

“The explosive rise of the ESG investment space has raised new questions about what constitutes fair and faithful marketing and disclosure around financial products and services,” said Americans for Financial Reform in an April letter to the FTC.

Across the border, the federal Canadian government has launched a review of the Competition Act after it became clear that the Competition Bureau, like its American cousin, has been hamstrung by limited enforcement powers and funding. In the meantime, the regulator has been more active than ever on the greenwash file. After fining Keurig $3 million for misleading coffee-pod-recycling claims last year, the Competition Bureau is currently investigating the climate claims made by Canada’s largest bank (RBC), six largest oil companies (operating under their umbrella organization Pathways Alliance) and the Canadian Gas Association, as well as a greenwashing complaint against North America’s largest forestry certifier (Sustainable Forestry Initiative).

“The Canadian government should set standards and enforce against greenwashing, not only for the good of consumers and the planet, but also so our marketplace is not distorted by false or confusing green claims.”

 

–Former environment minister Catherine McKenna

Still, agencies on both sides of the Atlantic have been accused of using a whack-a-mole approach to a widespread problem. While multiple studies have found that more than half of green claims are misleading, vague or unfounded, in Canada investigations are opened only after complaints are formally lodged by groups such as Ecojustice, Greenpeace and the Canadian Association of Physicians for the Environment.

The EU’s proposed Green Claims Directive would deliver a stricter framework, one that former Canadian environment minister Catherine McKenna wants Canada to emulate in tackling greenwashing “head on.”

“The Canadian government should set standards and enforce against greenwashing, not only for the good of consumers and the planet, but also so our marketplace is not distorted by false or confusing green claims,” McKenna said in a press release.

In the U.K., industry insiders are hopeful. One senior brand advisor told The Guardian that “the era of unspecific claims such as ‘environmentally friendly’ is over.”

Depending on how this year in regulatory overhauls shakes out around the globe, they may be right.

Adria Vasil is managing editor of Corporate Knights and the bestselling author of the Ecoholic book series.

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The forest carbon offsets used by Disney, Shell, Gucci, and other big corporations “are largely worthless and could make global heating worse,” reports The Guardian.

Journalism non-profit SourceMaterial, The Guardian, and German weekly Die Zeit conducted a nine-month investigation into the credits issued by Washington, DC-based Verra, the world’s leading carbon standard in the offsets market. They found that 94% of the non-profit’s rainforest offsets are likely to be “phantom credits” and do not represent genuine carbon reductions.

The investigation used satellite data from two 2020 studies by German, Dutch, and United Kingdom resource economists to check the results of 29 Verra-certified rainforest offset schemes. Only 6%, or 5.5 million of the 95 million carbon credits, were real emission reductions. And only eight of those 29 projects reduced any emissions at all. SourceMaterial observes that 95 million actual carbon credits, as opposed to “phantom” ones, would be “theoretically enough to balance the annual emissions from 25 coal-fired power plants or burning 220 million barrels of oil.”

Founded in 2007, Verra “operates a number of leading environmental standards for climate action and sustainable development, including its verified carbon standard (VCS) that has issued more than one billion carbon credits,” The Guardian says. The company approves 75% of all voluntary offsets, with rainforest protection or “avoided deforestation” schemes making up 40% of the total.

The process begins with a carbon credit project developer, either a private company or a conservation group, laying out a program “for activities that result, in theory, in a benefit to the climate,” explains SourceMaterial. “Each credit is designed to account for one tonne of carbon being removed from the atmosphere, or one tonne fewer being emitted.”

In the case of “avoided deforestation” projects—the most popular option—the developer must follow a methodology to prove the trees are actually at risk. The methodology can be written by the developer, prepared frameworks are also available for purchase from certifiers like Verra.

The developer then passes its proposed project on to an auditor, who makes sure that it aligns with the chosen methodology. The auditors are not required to “ensure that the methodology corresponds to reality.”

Once the auditors give the go-ahead, the project is approved by a certifier (like Verra), which assigns it carbon credits and allows it to register on its database.

Once in the database, a project’s carbon credits can be bought by companies seeking to offset emissions. Chevron, British Airways, Air France, Netflix, and Ben & Jerry’s are among Verra’s customers, along with Disney, Shell, and Gucci.

 

If we don’t learn from the failures of the last decade or so, then there’s a very large risk that investors, private individuals, and others will move away from any kind of willingness to pay to avoid tropical deforestation, and that would be a disaster.

 

–Julia Jones, Bangor University

 

Fossil fuel companies and airlines can, in turn, legally use their credits to inform their customers that they can drive or fly “carbon-neutral,” notes SourceMaterial.

The heart of the problem with the rainforest carbon schemes examined in the news investigation seems to be that they overestimate the threat to the forests involved by an average of 400%, according to a 2022 study by the University of Cambridge that has not yet been peer-reviewed.

Verra has objected to these findings, insisting that satellite data and standardized approaches cannot capture what is happening on the ground. It is this methodological myopia that explains the yawning gap between approved credits and the emissions reductions estimated by scientists, Verra says.

“Verra has certified over 1,500 carbon projects, which have been assessed tens of thousands of times by third party auditors,” Verra spokesperson Steve Zwick told SourceMaterial. But according to The Guardian, these third party auditors are frequently vetted by Verra itself.

Verra also says that since 2009, its work has channelled billions of dollars into forest preservation. But the company also takes 10 cents from project developers for every credit it verifies, says SourceMaterial. “The more credits it approves, the more money it makes, giving it little incentive to limit the number of substandard offsets on the market.”

And the carbon credit industry has some shady corners, SourceMaterial adds. For example, an auditor reviewing one of Verra’s popular methodologies for calculating climate benefit from avoided deforestation, VM0015, once warned that it would “grossly overestimate deforestation.” Verra revised the model, but also left the flawed original available to developers.

Early in the development of another Verra methodology, VM0007, the auditor warned against Verra’s desire to “consider a forest at risk if a project developer merely declared an intention to cut down trees.”

Many of these projects may have brought lots of benefits in terms of biodiversity conservation capacity and local communities, but the impacts on climate change on which they are premised are regrettably much weaker than hoped.

–Yadvinder Singh Malhi, Oxford University

There is also a fundamental problem with “avoided deforestation,” because it depends on the generation of a counterfactual: “if x amount of deforestation had not occurred, y amount of emissions would not have been generated.”

And counterfactuals are very tricky and deeply unreliable things, said Yadvinder Singh Malhi, an Oxford University professor of ecosystem science who was not involved in the investigation. “The challenge isn’t around measuring carbon stocks; it’s about reliably forecasting the future, what would have happened in the absence of the REDD+ [Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation] activity. And peering into the future is a dark and messy art in a world of complex societies, politics ,and economics.”

“Many of these projects may have brought lots of benefits in terms of biodiversity conservation capacity and local communities, but the impacts on climate change on which they are premised are regrettably much weaker than hoped,” Malhi added. “I wish it were otherwise, but this report is pretty compelling.”

Julia Jones, a Bangor University professor of conservation science and co-author of the Cambridge study, told the Guardian the carbon credit system needs urgent correction and renovation.

“We are at an absolutely critical place for the future of tropical forests,” Jones said. “If we don’t learn from the failures of the last decade or so, then there’s a very large risk that investors, private individuals, and others will move away from any kind of willingness to pay to avoid tropical deforestation, and that would be a disaster.”

Limiting deforestation is essential for achieving the world’s climate and biodiversity targets, said Thomas Crowther, professor of ecology at ETH Zürich and co-chair of the United Nations Decade on Ecosystem Restoration. “But transparency remains a key challenge, and it is critical that we use the best available scientific approaches to ensure the accountability of environmental commitments at scale,” he told the Guardian.

“Companies and citizens need to be able to support projects they can trust,” Crowther added. “We need to urgently create a system where this is a reality.”

This story originally appeared in The Energy Mix.

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In March, Jim Hourdequin, the CEO of Lyme Timber – one of the world’s largest suppliers of carbon offsets to companies like Chevron – admitted that lax standards have allowed his forestry company to earn US$53 million over the past two years without making significant changes to business as usual. The company received offset payments from polluting industries on projects that, as Bloomberg put it, “don’t actually change the way forests are managed, and therefore do little to help the climate.”

Carbon offsets have a bad name for a good reason. Some of the biggest polluters exploit offsets purely to avoid making cuts to their emissions. And some of the biggest offset sellers rake in profits while failing to achieve equitable or even tangible climate benefits. With a fifth of the world’s biggest companies already committed to United Nations net-zero targets, and virtually all relying on offsets to reach that goal, the growing climate accountability across the private sector is now driving growth of a carbon-offset industry that has its own climate accountability problems.

At the same time, offsets are one of the only opportunities for financing the critical work of ecosystem care and climate repair today. In Atlantic Canada, for example, which receives less than 3% of environmental funding nationally and experiences low rural incomes coupled with high rates of clearcut forestry, the non-profit I work for has used carbon partnerships with sustainable architecture and film companies to protect some of the region’s last carbon-rich and biodiverse forests.

This mix of failures and redeeming opportunities reflects the broader complexity of transitioning to a low-carbon economy, as well as society’s relatively novice response to the climate crisis. We’re still learning and adapting. It also, however, reflects the depth of exploitation that companies are capable of when market-based mechanisms are deployed in absence of strong policy and regulatory oversight.

Almost 20 years since the first carbon-offset mechanisms emerged, it is becoming increasingly difficult to forgive these ongoing failures. Carbon offsetting can hope to remain reputable today only if its two most harmful pitfalls are addressed: the failure to ensure significant reductions in overall emissions in first priority, and the failure to achieve genuine carbon-storage outcomes in an equitable way. In a bid to help solve these challenges and promote even greater investment in carbon offsetting, Mark Carney – the former governor of the Bank of Canada and the Bank of England – made bold promises at the COP26 climate conference to grow the voluntary market to US$100 billion per year by the end of this decade. Less than two years later, the Taskforce on Scaling Voluntary Carbon Markets is being scaled back. Now rebranded as the Integrity Council for the Voluntary Carbon Market, the initiative is grappling with the same regulatory shortfalls that have plagued offsets since their invention.

In the meantime, carbon markets are growing in Canada and around the world. According to Refinitiv, a subsidiary of the London Stock Exchange, the voluntary market reached a record high US$1 billion last year, while more established compliance markets surpassed US$850 billion.

Pioneering Papua New Guinea bans new carbon deals

Offsetting was popularized by the Kyoto Protocol, which came into force in 2005. The treaty recognized that wealthier countries are historically responsible for climate change, while nations throughout the Majority World – a term that replaces the expressions “developing world” or “Global South” to better recognize that this is where 80% of humanity lives – suffer the majority of negative impacts. All signatories set equalized emission reduction targets, recognizing their differentiated climate responsibilities, and a mechanism was created – offsetting – where those states failing to meet their climate goals could make up for it by transferring a proportionate amount of wealth to countries that were beating their own national targets and picking up the slack in the fight against climate change.

Papua New Guinea, an island state home to some of Earth’s largest remaining tropical forests cared for generatively by Indigenous communities for over 50,000 years, was positioned to be one of those countries that could exceed national targets. At the same 2005 UN climate summit in which offsetting was enacted, the government of Papua New Guinea put forward the first-ever proposal to store additional carbon by protecting exceptionally biodiverse and carbon-rich forests. They invited high-polluting states to pay for tropical forest protection to not only help meet global emission reduction targets but also replace the financial losses their country would face by deferring timber harvests – revenues that the country needed to take care of its people.

This April, Papua New Guinea’s minister of environment enacted a moratorium on new voluntary carbon-offset projects in the country. Civil society watchdogs identified major weaknesses and loopholes in projects being developed there and raised concerns that the exploitative history of logging interests infringing on the rights of Indigenous people was now simply being perpetuated by carbon project developers. The government has banned all new voluntary carbon projects until laws can be enacted that properly safeguard the rights of the people who have lived and worked with forests forever.

Carbon offsets have a bad name for a good reason.

Should we throw out all carbon offsets? Not quite yet. Transitioning millions of hectares of land and millions of jobs toward the protection and restoration of Earth’s natural life-support systems is fundamental to halting the climate crisis. Carbon-offset frameworks can aid in that transition, by channelling wealth into carbon-storage livelihoods like climate-focused forestry, farming and conservation. But we need fair carbon-storage payments that directly compensate the people who live and work most closely with the land, enabling them to make decisions optimized for carbon drawdown, and we need to decouple the source of those payments from the continued emissions of the highest-polluting industries.

Oil and gas companies, for example, shouldn’t be allowed to participate in offset programs; they should just be required to reduce their emissions. Analysis from Oxfam found that it would take a forest the size of Ghana to offset just 15% of BP’s ongoing emissions by 2050. That’s a single company and doesn’t take into account BP’s historical emissions, which also require reparations. There is literally not enough planet for the highest-polluting industries to offset their way out of the climate crisis.

Hope in first-ever citizen forest carbon program in Canada

Over the past decade, our small team at Community Forests International has worked on the forest and people side of the climate equation. We’ve developed new approaches to forestry that maximize carbon storage and climate resilience, we’ve informed policy improvements at the provincial and national scale, and we’ve developed novel forest carbon projects.

This summer, with collaborators across a community of more than 80,000 rural small forest owners in the Maritime provinces and partners at the Natural Capital Exchange (NCX) – a leading carbon marketplace dedicated to democratizing forest carbon markets – we will be enrolling tens of thousands of acres into the first-ever citizen forest carbon program in Canada.

In a region with some of the most intense forest cutting and lowest incomes nationally, this reflects the potential in transition pathways that centre the people most affected – in this case rural, forest-dependent communities and economies. It is creating entirely new climate-focused forest occupations and incomes for people who can now go to work storing more carbon in the forests they care for.

It would take a forest the size of Ghana to offset just 15% of BP’s ongoing emissions by 2050. There is literally not enough forest for polluting industries to offset their way out of the crisis.

There are countless opportunities like this, and carbon offsets are a relatively small part of the story. But the work of nature-based carbon storage, like virtually all climate solutions, requires far greater investment than it is currently afforded – and investment that is unconflicted by the ongoing climate damages of the most polluting industries. Otherwise, these solutions will fail to produce their promised results on a scale and timeline that is meaningful in the global climate crisis. Or the positive measures that society takes to remunerate ecosystem care in one sector will be cancelled out by damages in another – the worst possible outcome of carbon offsetting.

UN Secretary-General António Guterres described the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report, published in February, as “an atlas of human suffering and a damning indictment of failed climate leadership.” The window is closing on limiting planetary heating to 1.5°C. Global emissions must peak by 2025 and then plummet, while at the same time forests and other ecosystems must be protected and restored to their full carbon-sequestration capacity by 2030.

What type of world will we face toward the end of this decade? A brighter one, if we make full use of all possible climate solutions today, including carbon offsetting. But it requires us to remember that tools like carbon offsets were only ever invented to enable a transition – not to delay it. In the words of Jonathan Foley, the executive director of Project Drawdown, “the best offset is the one you do not need.”

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I’ve witnessed this transformation here in the Zanzibar archipelago, a delicate string of islands in the Indian Ocean where my colleagues have been planting millions of trees over the past decade. This week, I visited dry and rugged coral areas where tree cover is now returning to the land and witnessed how this is repairing the local ecosystem and creating jobs and wealth for the people who live within it. Our team recently expanded this same approach to nearby Mozambique – and it is crucial work increasingly in demand around the world.

Forests and people aren’t thriving together today. Forest loss accelerated in 2020, increasing more than 12% even while overall economic activity declined globally due to COVID-19. According to a recent big-picture analysis by Our World in Data, however, “[a] future with more people and more forest is possible.”

Making the necessary transformations at scale is the idea behind the Canadian government’s 2 Billion Trees program. Unfortunately, the government hasn’t reached much of this goal yet, according to The Globe and Mail. The most recently available numbers suggest that only 8.5 million trees have been planted so far, and 7.6 million of those are spruce and lodgepole pine planted in British Columbia. In the rest of the country, 28% of the total trees can be attributed to the relatively small charity that I work for, Community Forests International, and I can assure you we were not expecting to score so high on the leaderboard. The final totals for 2021 will be available soon, but the overall story of lagging results remains the theme. 

And Canada needs a much more ambitious goal than planting two billion trees over 10 years if we are going to realize the potential our forests offer for climate security. For example, requiring forestry companies to store more carbon than they emit through their harvest operations would be far more significant. In fact, Canada’s managed forests currently emit more carbon than they store, because of overharvesting and the increased impacts of climate change, such as fires.

A new Indigenous seed-collection initiative, just announced as part of the 2 Billion Trees program and to be delivered by the National Tree Seed Centre in New Brunswick, is an exciting step in the right direction. The initiative aims to partner with Indigenous communities to incorporate traditional ecological knowledge (TEK) into seed saving and to gather seeds from species of special cultural and economic value to First Nations. Proceeding with care, especially in respecting and protecting the invaluable Indigenous knowledge shared through this process, is critical to ensuring that justice is upheld in this forest effort and that the same extractive mistakes on the land are not repeated in the realm of knowledge and culture.

Canada needs a much more ambitious goal than planting two billion trees over 10 years if we are going to realize the potential our forests offer for climate security.

People will become a positive force for forests and for the climate when we achieve justice in how forests are cared for. That means empowering rural and Indigenous communities that live and work most closely with forests with the rights to decide how their home ecosystems are respected and managed. Too often those decisions are made by companies with prevailing short-term profit motives and no rooted place in the ecosystems and communities they’re impacting. 

Deforestation in the Amazon reached a record high last month, and new research based on two decades of satellite images published in Nature Climate Change warns that the world’s largest rainforest is now approaching a “tipping point.” Among the worst drivers of not just the deforestation and greenhouse gas emissions but also the displacement of forest-dependent communities are multinational agribusinesses and their foreign financiers. The same satellite record also reveals vibrant areas of the Amazon that have remained healthy and intact, with distinct boundaries matching areas where Indigenous rights have been upheld.

We have to get beyond the idea that people are necessarily the problem. People have always been a part of forests. We are not separate. There’s roughly the same area of “wild” land on Earth today as there was 12,000 years ago. It’s shocking to those of us immersed in colonial narratives of “pristine nature,” but people have always shaped forests in significant ways. The difference today is that the ways in which colonial societies and economies shape land is overwhelmingly devastating.

Today, more than 97% of land on Earth is no longer intact and has lost the required richness and biodiversity to maintain ecological integrity. Our life-support systems are collapsing. Protecting and restoring more forests as biodiverse cultural landscapes – by respecting local and Indigenous land rights and knowledge as a first priority – is not only ethically necessary but one of the most important contributions we can make to stabilizing the climate. Because the history, wisdom and science are clear: Indigenous and other collective communities do a better job of keeping forests and their vital carbon stores intact over the long-term.

I see this here in Zanzibar, where community groups are time and time again the best protectors of coastal mangrove forests. Mangroves grow half on land and half in the ocean and are the most carbon-dense forests in the world. At-risk coastal communities we have the honour of working alongside have been taking it upon themselves to safeguard and restore these special mangrove ecosystems. They’re doing it without any carbon-offset financing or payment for ecosystem services because they understand that mangroves provide their nearby homes with irreplaceable protection against rising sea levels and that the work is simply necessary.

And I see it in my home province of New Brunswick, where the Wolastoqey Nation is striving to assert the right to care for and benefit from millions of acres of traditional lands, much of which was sold illegally for $1.50 an acre to companies that have profited from their destruction. This movement is so important right now – most significantly for justice and reconciliation, but also for the forests of New Brunswick and for the global climate. No tree-planting strategy could match the climate and economic benefit offered by transitioning these lands back under the care of Indigenous communities with ongoing reparations to practise restorative management optimized for carbon drawdown.

The International Day of Forests happens to coincide with the International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, and this invites us to reflect on all the ways forests and justice are woven together today and every day – and then to take action.

Daimen Hardie is co-founder of Community Forests International.

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Carbon markets are trading systems through which countries, businesses, individuals or other entities buy or sell units of greenhouse gas emissions. These markets facilitate carbon offsetting — compensating for carbon dioxide emissions in one location by reducing or removing emissions elsewhere. For example, a company in the United Kingdom that relies on natural gas heating might buy offsets that finance the restoration of a coastal mangrove forest in Indonesia.

But the increased interest in carbon markets that operate across borders comes with a number of risks. In particular, many forest carbon offsetting schemes are located in lands historically claimed, inhabited and used by Indigenous Peoples and local communities. But often, the rights of these communities have not been secured, putting their well-being at risk — and threatening the future of carbon markets.

Carbon markets growing

The reliance on carbon markets has been criticized for allowing developed nations and corporations to delay their emissions reductions, encroaching on the lands of Indigenous Peoples and local communities and commodifying nature.

Meanwhile, the voluntary carbon market, which enables companies and people to buy carbon offsets as part of corporate or personal commitments to social responsibility, is expanding rapidly. In 2021, the value of carbon credits traded on the voluntary market exceeded US$1 billion, more than double the value in 2020.

Projects that sequester carbon in forests and soils generate a significant share of the carbon credits traded on this market. Such projects are also likely to play an increasing role in compliance markets, as countries seek to meet their mandatory emissions reduction targets and commitments.

A recent report by researchers from the Rights and Resources Initiative and McGill University, including ourselves, found that many of the carbon sinks targeted by offsetting schemes are located in lands where Indigenous or local rights have not been secured. Most of the tropical forested countries looking to benefit from carbon markets have not yet defined communities’ rights over the carbon held in their customary lands and territories.

This situation threatens both the well-being of communities who face increased threats of land grabs, criminalization, conflict and other human rights violations, and the viability of carbon markets themselves.

Communities at risk

At COP26, in November 2021, states agreed on a series of rules to govern market-based activities under Article 6 of the Paris Agreement. Article 6 sets out co-operative approaches that countries can take to reach their climate targets, including through the use of market mechanisms such as carbon markets.

Negotiators weren’t able completely eliminate the loopholes for using offsets. But the rules aim to improve environmental integrity, avoid the double counting of emissions reductions — where a single greenhouse gas emission reduction or removal unit is counted more than once to comply with emissions reductions targets — and provide enhanced transparency.

As private and public carbon markets develop, the potential benefits and risks of carbon trading for Indigenous Peoples and local communities increase.

Potential benefits include increased financial flows for forest protection and conservation, better recognition of community rights and improved livelihood opportunities, such as the sustainable production of non-timber forest products.

For example, a Plan Vivo, a carbon offsetting standard, is leading a project in collaboration with the hunter-gatherer Hadza and pastoralist Datooga communities in northwestern Tanzania has reduced deforestation, enhanced tenure security (the recognition of a person’s rights to land by others) — and provided local communities with additional income.

On the other hand, increasing the economic value of the carbon sequestered in the lands and territories held by communities, whether legally recognized or not, creates incentives for land-grabbing by corporations, NGOs and governments. One of the most notorious projects of this kind is a Kenyan program for reducing deforestation that has led to the forced eviction of thousands of Indigenous people from their traditional lands and forests.

To maximize benefits and avoid harms, governments, public and private investors, and other actors in the world of carbon finance must adopt rights-based approaches to fully respect, protect and realize the rights of Indigenous Peoples, local communities and Afro-descendant Peoples, such as Quilombola in Brazil. But achieving such ends within the context of rapidly increasing pressure for results will not be easy.

The importance of securing communities’ rights

Our report found that many countries still lack the laws, regulations and safeguards needed to ensure the rights of Indigenous Peoples and local communities were fully protected.

Our study analyzed 31 countries that hold almost 70 per cent of the world’s tropical forests. We found that less than a quarter of them explicitly recognize the rights of communities to govern and benefit from carbon rights. Even fewer have implemented the rules and safeguards required by the United Nations and the World Bank for forest carbon trading.

Key findings from our recent research include:

• Only six countries explicitly recognize community rights to carbon (Ethiopia, Peru and the Republic of Congo) or tie such rights to the legal ownership of lands and forests, whether private, public or communal (Brazil, Colombia and Costa Rica).
• Only five countries — Costa Rica, Indonesia, Mexico, the Philippines and Vietnam define how carbon and non-carbon benefits will be shared. These include the quantity of emissions avoided or carbon sequestered, as well as the additional, positive socio-economic or environmental effects of these activities. Only Vietnam has an operational benefit-sharing scheme.
• Only two of the 17 countries that have developed feedback and grievance mechanisms have put them into operation (Costa Rica and Mexico).

Closing the gap

To address the considerable gap that lies between the ambition and implementation of voluntary carbon markets, crediting schemes, private investors, civil society organizations and dedicated institutions must work with tropical forest governments to:

• Secure the legal recognition and protection of the land, forest and territorial rights of Indigenous Peoples, local communities and Afro-descendant Peoples, including the carbon stored therein and the ecosystem services that these provide.
• Adopt robust safeguards to protect the human rights of Indigenous Peoples, local communities, Afro-descendant Peoples and women within these groups, including their right to free, prior and informed consent.
• Ensure the full and effective participation of communities and peoples in all Article 6 activities, from initial design to implementation, monitoring and reporting.
• Provide access to independent legal counsel and grievance redress mechanisms for Indigenous Peoples, local communities and Afro-descendant Peoples.
• Dramatically increase direct financing support for community-led initiatives, needs and priorities, including capacity building, natural resource governance and local livelihoods.

Combined with the fundamental decarbonization of global supply chains and changes in the incentives that drive deforestation and forest degradation, binding commitments to respect forest and land rights are necessary to protect the world’s forests and the communities that live in or near them.

Sebastien Jodoin is an associate professor of law at McGill University.

Katherine Lofts is a senior research associate with the Canada Research Chair in Human Rights, Health, and the Environment at McGill University.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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Carbon offset projects, including those from forests, aren’t perfect. In fact, there is a history of many such initiatives being revealed as flashy greenwashing endeavours that were built without sufficient assurances about their “additionality” (emission reductions from offsets are “additional” if they happen as a result of a carbon market, and would not have occurred without it). This situation has improved but is still a challenge, with news breaking earlier this year that The Nature Conservancy, creators of some of the biggest forest carbon offset initiatives in the U.S., have undertaken a review of all their projects as a result of concerns that that organization is facilitating the sale of meaningless carbon credits to corporate clients.

The UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) – a group of thousands of scientists from around the world who put forward recommendations that are subject to line-by-line scrutiny – shows that there’s no scenario where we can avoid the worst-case climate breakdown in the next decade without protecting and restoring forest carbon, including through market mechanisms like offsets. To be sure, the scale of necessary drawdown means that we must employ all tools available to us, and quickly – including robust government regulation or incentives and strong market solutions.

That means that rigorous and transparent forest carbon offset projects are going to play a critical role in incentivizing forest management at a scale that will actually help Canada reach its 2030 climate goals. In the Maritimes, forest carbon offset projects could help support the region’s 80,000 small-scale family forest owners conserve and manage almost five million hectares of forests for climate benefit. The alternative is that these forests continue to be decimated as a result of the only markets currently available to landowners: timber markets that drive widespread clearcutting, which only worsens the climate crisis.

Authenticity is key – so here are five ways to get forest carbon offsets right:

1. Let the people most directly affected make the decisions.

   Carbon offset projects should be led by the people most closely connected to them. The regulations and programs governing those offsets, in particular nature-based ones, should also be designed by those same communities. This is how we ensure that carbon offset projects don’t just devolve into corporate greenwashing initiatives – by supporting Indigenous-led conservation and rural community-led projects, with benefits returning to those communities and the ecosystems that surround them.

2. Make them truly additional.

   Close the loopholes, make offsets programs tight, and don’t leave any cracks open for exploitation. To this end, several national conservation organizations and other experts have said that correct and authentic accounting of the emissions that are driving demand for offsets is important, as is having a clear process on the supply side to verify the authenticity of offsets that are being sold. That means using top protocols, such as those created by long-operating standards associations like Verra and Gold Standard, and closely scrutinizing proposed projects (including third-party verifiers) to ensure that the offsets that are being sold are genuinely additional.

3. Don’t be complacent.

   Climate science and the carbon offsets space are both highly dynamic, and protocols and methodologies are constantly improving. Accept that the protocols that work well today may be improved upon and changed tomorrow – and that’s okay. For example, we’re finally seeing protocols and programs that actually ensure benefits to forest owners and communities, rather than just large corporate interests.

4. The goal should be drawdown, not just net-zero.

   Focusing on “offsets” implies only neutralizing emissions that are currently being produced; it doesn’t address the backlog of historic greenhouse gas emissions that are already in the atmosphere and driving the climate crisis. To make a measurable impact on the climate, we need a drawdown of those historic pollutants, and we need to be carbon-negative. Robust government regulations can drive this, as can more aggressive offsetting programs. With less than a decade left to avoid worst-case climate catastrophe, being net-zero just isn’t good enough.

5. Embed goals of addressing the twin crises of biodiversity loss and climate change.

   Any climate solutions, including carbon offsets, that don’t also protect natural ecosystems and halt the rapid loss of biodiversity are a failure. Globally, we are experiencing the sixth cataclysmic extinction event in history, this one caused by humans. In Canada alone, we have experienced a 68% average decline of birds, amphibians, mammals, fish and reptiles since 1970, a loss that is estimated will be a US$10-trillion hit to the world economy by 2050 under our current “business-as-usual” trajectory. We need nature-based solutions, including carbon offset programs, that directly address habitat loss and destruction of ecosystem services. Otherwise we’re still losing the battle.

All this is to say that carbon offsets, while still imperfect, are one necessary tool in the toolbox of solutions for mitigating, even reversing, climate chaos. And we need all the tools we can lay our hands on, immediately – that’s how we’ll make meaningful gains toward our Paris Agreement goals, and toward a resilient future.

Megan de Graaf (she/her) is a forest ecologist and the Forest Program Director at Community Forests International, and a farm and forest owner in southern New Brunswick, on traditional and unceded Mi’kmaq territory. 

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More than 100 countries have either set or are considering commitments of carbon neutrality, with most – like Canada – aiming for a 2050 net-zero target date. They are joined by more than 800 cities, including Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver.

The private sector is also stepping up. Financial institutions around the world, including Canada’s biggest banks, are committing to net-zero investment and lending portfolios by 2050. At the same time, we’re seeing an outpouring of carbon-neutrality pledges from leading global corporations, including Walmart Inc., Ford Motor Company, Royal Dutch Shell and Canadian oil sands giants Cenovus Energy Inc and Suncor Energy Inc.

However, as carbon-neutral pledges mount, there are concerns about the credibility of those corporate targets and the strategies being proposed to reach them.

Companies are putting too much focus on the “net” part of the equation and not enough on the “zero.” There is a danger, as one policy researcher puts it, of getting trapped in the net.

Deep decarbonization

Corporate plans often rely heavily on “offset” systems in which they purchase emission credits from other firms or organizations that reduce carbon emissions more cheaply than the corporation can. On paper, such firms will be advancing toward net-zero; in reality, their own carbon intensity will remain stubbornly high.

Critics also worry that corporate strategists are pinning too much of their effort on nature-based solutions when there remains considerable debate about the credibility and permanence of the resulting GHG-reduction credits.

This is not to diminish the critical importance of climate-friendly practices in forestry, agricultural and nature conservation. Or the crucial contribution that will be required from negative emission technologies like “direct air capture” projects, which can suck carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and sequester it.

However, such strategies need to be in addition to not in lieu of deep decarbonization efforts that displace fossil fuel use in transportation, electricity, heating buildings and industry.

“We absolutely need to be focused on the ‘zero,’” says Catherine Abreu, executive director of Climate Action Network Canada. “Human beings are easily seduced by silver-bullet, technocratic fixes. And there is an aspect of the net-zero conversation that lends itself to that kind of seductive thinking, and a tendency in some quarters to manipulate the idea of net-zero and turn it into something that perpetuates the status quo.”

Still, it’s increasingly clear that success in limiting the carnage of climate change will require every mitigation tactic that is available. All the more so because we have failed until very recently to accelerate the low-carbon transition of the mainstream economy.

Safe bets and wild cards

In its groundbreaking 2018 report, the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) embraced the “net” in various scenarios for holding the average global temperature increase to 1.5°C. The IPCC laid out four “illustrative pathways” for achieving the 1.5° goal, and all of them featured some reliance on “negative emissions,” such as nature-based solutions or carbon capture and storage.

The Canadian Institute for Climate Choices (CICC) characterizes many of the negative emissions solutions as “wild cards” that could play an important role but face serious questions about effectiveness and commercial viability.

There is tendency in some quarters to manipulate the idea of net-zero and turn it into something that perpetuates the status quo.”

–Catherine Abreu, executive director of Climate Action Network Canada

In its February report, Canada’s Net Zero Future, the CICC warns that we cannot shirk on “safe bets” – such as energy efficiency, renewable power and electric vehicles – in order to rely on those wild-card technologies. They include direct air capture (DAC) technology and nature-based solutions.

Carbon capture, use and sequestration (CCUS) can play an important role, both in the short-term for highly concentrated emissions of carbon dioxide and, potentially, over the longer term with less-concentrated CO2 sources. Wild-card technologies like hydrogen, DAC and nature-based approaches are high-risk but may be high-reward in the push for net-zero by 2050.

Such technologies could “fundamentally change Canada’s path to net zero,” the CICC report says. “Wild cards are a potential complement to safe bets – not a substitute. They are important for unlocking the deeper, cost-effective reductions that can get Canada to its ultimate net-zero target.”

Offsets as regulatory compliance

Meanwhile, the federal and provincial governments are allowing companies to use offsets to meet some small portion of their regulated emission-reduction requirements. In March, Ottawa published draft regulations for its planned GHG-offset credit system. The proposal details how companies can use offset credits to meet up to 10% of the emission reductions required under regulatory schemes such as the industrial carbon-pricing system or the clean fuel standard, which will force refiners and importers to reduce the carbon intensity of the liquid fuels they sell.

They will have to demonstrate that the emissions reductions are in addition to what would have occurred in the absence of the credit purchase and that the GHGs will be stored permanently, Environment and Climate Change Canada says.

Nature-based strategies for mitigating climate change are increasingly being touted as a key element in national and corporate net-zero plans.

In keeping with accepted United Nations practices, Ottawa includes significant contributions from land-use and nature-based solutions in its plan to achieve up to 45% reductions in GHGs from 2005 levels by 2030. The federal government says it will plant two billion trees as part of its strategy and conserve 25% of Canada’s land mass as part of its climate mitigation strategy. In its April budget, the Liberal government also allocated $185 million over 10 years for an Agricultural Climate Solutions program, which aims to sequester carbon in soil and vegetation.

“There is less incentive for those firms to go after their own emissions because they can instead go after low-cost offsets, which are not always real emission reductions.”

–Nic Rivers, University of Ottawa

An international study funded by the U.S.-based Nature Conservancy concluded that nature-based solutions could provide 37% of the most cost-effective GHG reductions required by 2030 to keep the world on track to limit average temperature increases to less than 2°C.

However, the use of nature-based credits to offset emissions has drawn considerable flak because of concerns about accounting accuracy, additionality and permanence.

In an opinion piece published on CBC’s website in March, three leading climate academics (Nic Rivers, University of Ottawa; Kathryn Harrison, University of British Columbia; and Mark Jaccard, Simon Fraser University) said the use of offsets in regulatory systems “is likely to give the illusion of progress, even as it increases carbon emissions.”

They argue the carbon accounting is unreliable because it doesn’t assess actual emission impacts, but rather measures outcomes compared to some assumed baseline. In many cases, “emission reductions” are created by a change in activity – sustainable forestry practices or capturing methane from municipal waste sites – where business-as-usual baselines assume problematic practices that should be better regulated, they wrote.

Meanwhile, industrial emitters can offset a tonne of real GHG emissions from a smokestack against a tonne of offsets. “There is less incentive for those firms to go after their own emissions because they can instead go after low-cost offsets, which are not always real emission reductions,” Rivers said in an interview. He doesn’t question the importance of nature-based solutions but argues they should be pursued separately from regulatory compliance.

In its net-zero report, the Canadian Institute for Climate Choices says nature-based solutions present “enormous potential for the low-cost sequestration” of carbon and could be useful in offsetting emissions from hard-to-mitigate, emissions-intensive industries such as cement. However, the authors echo the concerns raised by the professors with regard to additionality and permanence.

Save a tree, store some carbon

The Darkwoods Forest Carbon Project in southwestern British Columbia is owned by the Nature Conservancy of Canada and is the largest verified offset project in North America. The Nature Conservancy – which is not affiliated with the international organization – purchased the 63-square-kilometre property in 2008 with plans to improve forestry management and other conservation practices and sell carbon offsets.

The Darkwoods Forest Carbon Project estimates it saves the equivalent of 125,000 tonnes of CO2 emissions each year. Since its inception, it has sold well over a million tonnes of carbon credits in the voluntary market in which corporations like Microsoft, Shell and United Parcel Service buy offsets to meet their own GHG-reduction targets.

The Nature Conservancy has had the emission reductions verified by third parties under the international Sustainable Development Verified Impact Standard. It includes precise calculations of the carbon stored in the various trees that make up the conservation area, as well as a reserve of credits that guard against unexpected losses such as forest fires.

However, the B.C. Auditor General criticized the Darkwoods offset accounting in a 2013 report. The report reflects many of the concerns that have been raised with regard to nature-based solutions. It concluded that the organization had already decided to purchase the property prior to any commitments for offsets, and so the assumed improvements to forestry management would have happened without the carbon credits. As a result, there was no additionality, it said. It also suggested that Nature Conservancy used overly aggressive assumptions about timber harvesting in the region for its baseline, against which it measures the carbon credits resulting from conservation.

Nature Conservancy rebutted the Auditor General’s report, arguing that the organization had always considered the revenue from carbon credits as an important component of its agreement to purchase and conserve the Darkwoods Forest. A letter from Verra president David Antonioli, whose company verifies the credits, complained of a series of errors and misunderstandings about the verification process that had been committed by the Auditor General’s team in preparing its report.

Rob Wilson, director of conservation finance for Nature Conservancy, notes that carbon storage is typically only one aspect of a conservation project that protects species habitat, maintains natural spaces for human enjoyment and, in some cases, provides greater resilience from the mounting impacts of climate change. “The revenue from the carbon credits has allowed us to support other conservation work across the country,” he says.

Other nature-based programs have also faced criticism. Verra’s Antonioli responded in May with charges of bias against a report from Greenpeace and The Guardian newspaper that concluded airlines were relying on “phantom credits” in a forestry project in Peru. A joint report from ProPublica and MIT Technology Review published in late April concluded that California’s forestry offsets program “creates the false appearance of progress.”

Corporate offsets: Financing solutions or paying to pollute?

Certainly, the purchase of offsets – whether nature-based or technological – is a key component in corporate net-zero targets.

In February, Royal Dutch Shell released its plan for achieving net-zero emissions by 2050, with declining crude production, investments in carbon capture and storage, and a hefty portfolio of nature-based offsets that would represent 120 megatonnes per year of CO2-equivalent emissions by 2030. (For scale, that’s equivalent to roughly two-thirds of all the emissions from Canada’s oil and gas sector in 2019.)

Shell’s Canadian subsidiary is purchasing credits from the Darkwoods project and is pursuing a reforestation project with the Tsilhqot’in First Nation in B.C. and a grasslands protection initiative with federal and provincial governments, both of which it says will yield carbon credits.

“At worst, these [portfolio] commitments and investments/divestments risk being a shell game where image-conscious companies shed their high-emitting assets in favour of low- or zero-emitting ones, only for less-visible or image-concerned players to snap them up.” 

–Jason Dion, Canadian Institute for Climate Choices

Similarly, Enbridge is purchasing and retaining renewable energy credits and investing in nature-based solutions and offsets.

Of note, few of the major oil companies in Calgary are pledging to reduce their overall emissions by 2030, despite the reality that oil and gas broadly accounts for 26% of the country’s total GHGs and the federal government has committed to slashing national emissions by 40% to 45% by 2030. On May 26, Suncor said it would reduce its GHGs by one-third by 2030 across its value chain, on the way to net-zero by 2050.

Canadian oil sands giant Cenovus Energy also says it aspires to reach a net-zero target by 2050. However, it’s focused only on emissions that result from its own operations and the electricity it purchases from the grid. International standards, like those put forward by the Task Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosure, urge corporations to disclose and manage all the emissions related to the production, processing and consumption of their products – known as Scope 3 emissions.

In light of its merger with Husky Energy on January 1, Cenovus is reviewing its targets and plans. “We will be completing an analysis to set new near-term targets in 2021 that align with our revised long-term business plan,” says company spokesman Reg Curren.

In the sustainability report Cenovus released last July, the company said it would reduce the per-barrel, GHG-intensity of its operations by 30% between 2019 and 2030 and would aim to hold absolute emissions flat at 8.8 megatonnes of CO2 equivalent. Cenovus said its net-zero aspiration would rely on “technology solutions beyond those that are commercial and economic today.”

It’s unclear whether a rebalancing of Cenovus’s assets to include, for example, more renewable energy would result in a society-wide reduction in emissions.

“At worst, these [portfolio] commitments and investments/divestments risk being a shell game where image-conscious companies shed their high-emitting assets in favour of low- or zero-emitting ones, only for less-visible or image-concerned players to snap them up,” says Jason Dion, author of the Institute for Climate Choices net-zero report.

However, if overall oil and gas supply declines because of shifting capital expenditure decisions, and new investment is plowed into clean energy development, the shift in portfolio would represent substantial progress.

Long-term promises vs short-term realities

The oil companies aren’t alone in making long-term pledges that don’t align with their short-term business plans.

Three of Canada’s big banks – Toronto-Dominion, Bank of Montreal and Royal Bank of Canada – have pledged some form of net-zero target by 2050, either in their lending portfolios or total financing. RBC’s commitment, for example, relates to companies in its lending portfolio being, in aggregate, net-zero by 2050, spokesman Andrew Block says.

The big Canadian banks have also announced increased targets for sustainable financing.

The banks are working with the Canadian Standards Association and various industry groups to produce a standard for “transition financing” – an effort to promote “green” lending to energy-intensive companies for investments that result in emission reductions. The CSA-led committee hopes to release its transition taxonomies by summer, though they have been previously delayed over disagreements about what kind of investments would qualify.

“If you are going to meet those targets, you will have to stop financing fossil fuels very, very soon.”

–Eric Usher, head of the UN Environment Programme’s Finance Initiative

Meanwhile, Canada’s big banks remain major financiers for the global oil and gas industry, including recent oil sands expansion projects. Together, the large Canadian banks provided nearly US$400 billion in financing for fossil fuel companies between 2016 and 2020, says a report from the Rainforest Action Network and affiliated NGOs.

If they are going to meet net-zero lending targets, the banks will have to pivot away from the fossil fuel sector and their financial support for projects that will be spewing GHG emissions for decades, or the pipelines that enable growing oil and gas production.

As of late May, none of the major Canadian banks had joined the UN-convened Net-Zero Banking Alliance, which commits members to a net-zero pathway that includes science-based 2030 commitments and interim targets every five years. While membership in the Net-Zero Banking Alliance doesn’t formally require institutions to stop lending to the fossil fuel sector, the need for them to align with the 1.5°C goal will drive that result, says Eric Usher, head of the UN Environment Programme’s Finance Initiative.

“If you are going to meet those targets, you will have to stop financing fossil fuels very, very soon,” Usher told a webinar hosted by the Canadian Association for the Club of Rome on May 5. The principles for membership in the alliance also require that banks’ climate commitments focus on GHG reductions in carbon-intensive industries and “not rely heavily on negative emissions technology.”

National governments are not going to succeed with deep decarbonization strategies and net-zero targets unless their commitments are matched by global corporations in key sectors. That will require a mix of regulatory pressure and voluntary action.

There must be absolute clarity around the net-zero strategy. That is, we must drive as quickly and aggressively as possible to decarbonize our economies through active transportation and urban planning, energy efficiency and switching away from fossil fuels. Negative-emission, wildcard solutions – whether nature-based or technological – can be relied on to net out the most hard-to-eliminate emissions and, in the case of conservation, can provide important co-benefits that add value.

Offsets can yield some short-term benefits in terms of cost-efficient emission reductions. They are no substitute for fundamental transformation of emission-intensive industries.

Shawn McCarthy is an Ottawa-based writer who focuses on climate change and the low-carbon energy economy.

From Corporate Knights Summer Issue, in print June 30, 2021.

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“When we are facing climate chaos and these big storms come through, we can suck it in,” says Flies, referring to her soil’s ability to miraculously absorb inches of rain that turn neighbouring fields into a mud bath. A decade into working the land organically, she and her husband, like millions of farmers around the globe, were facing hotter summers, more violent storms and more erratic harvests. The former international election observers–turned farmers were looking for solutions to make their property – The New Farm – more resilient to the impacts of the changing climate. That’s when they came across a farming philosophy that turned them into soil evangelists.

The New York Times has called it the yoga of farming. The phrase “regenerative agriculture” was coined in the 1980s but has its roots in Indigenous and small-scale farming traditions around the world. Instead of tilled rows of monoculture crops on depleted soil, regenerative farms follow a few basic tenets: disturb the earth as little as possible (that means putting down tillers and minimizing synthetic pesticides and fertilizers), never leave the soil bare (farmers plant cover crops like clover and legumes between rows) and embrace biodiversity, both aboveground and below. Proponents say that diverse crops and, optionally, carefully rotated grazing livestock help fuel microscopic soil biodiversity, which, combined synergistically with other regenerative practices, increases soil’s water and carbon absorption power. That makes farmsteads like The New Farm notably more flood- and drought-resistant, and potentially more greenhouse gas–absorbent, too.

Now the concepts are spreading like wildfire. You’ll see the term “regenerative agriculture” cropping up in news feeds, on the back of cereal boxes and in celebrity-studded Netflix docs. Big Food players like General Mills, Danone, Unilever and Nestlé are ramping up regenerative pilots around the globe. Apparel brands like Patagonia, Gucci and Timberland are preaching the powers of regenerative farm-to-closet fashion. This past Earth Day, PepsiCo announced it would be implementing regenerative practices across its entire ecological footprint. The new Pepsi challenge? Convert all seven million acres of its ingredient supply by 2030, starting with 500,000 acres by year’s end. The move, it said, would eliminate three million tons of greenhouse gas emissions by the end of the decade. “Today, we’re accelerating our Positive Agriculture agenda, because we know we have to do even more to create truly systemic change,” said Jim Andrew, PepsiCo’s Chief Sustainability Officer.

Whether you buy the sincerity of their press releases or don’t, there’s no denying climate change is threatening the world’s food supply. Illycaffè’s chair, Andrea Illy, has been vocal about the looming reality that by 2050, “about three-fourths of the land used to grow Arabica coffee will not be suitable.” Similar stats threaten a number of global commodities. Food companies are betting on regenerative practices as a win-win to help them future-proof the food sector: the climate-resilient crops stabilize long-term swings in food supplies while helping companies meet net-zero emissions pledges and keep climate-risk-averse investors happy. And farmers – big and small, organic and conventional – who try regenerative on for size say they’re boosting yields and increasing profits, all while healing the planet.

LEAVE NO SOIL UNTURNED

Until she happened upon France’s Ministry of Agriculture initiative on the role of soil in combatting climate change, Flies had no idea she had unwittingly been wrecking her soil’s natural structure through an age-old practice. It turns out tilling the land destroys complex fungal and microbial networks that make up the earth’s life-sustaining microbiome – all while releasing valuable moisture into the air and quietly unleashing billions of tons of carbon into the atmosphere.

Flies ended up doing farmer-led research trials on their tilled versus untilled fields with the Ecological Farmers Association of Ontario. “What we were finding was we could get on untilled fields a month earlier, [our salad greens] would germinate almost a week faster, [untilled fields] would retain more water in the soil, and our yield was higher,” she says. “We couldn’t believe it.”

Tilling is just one of a number of farming methods that have diminished the soil’s capacity to lock in carbon. Rattan Lal, a professor of soil science at Ohio State University, estimates that agricultural practices have released 135 billion tons of carbon into the atmosphere since the start of the Industrial Age – emissions that remain there to this day.

The infamous Dust Bowl of the 1930s transformed the American and Canadian Great Plains into “black blizzards” of eroded topsoil after settlers plowed under millions of acres of native grasslands (grasslands that are now one of the most endangered ecosystems on the planet) to plant water-intensive cash crops. After years of drought and over-plowing, farm dreams turned to dust and accelerated farming’s great carbon release.

While Prairie farmers of the era were eventually encouraged to plant “a great wall of trees” and set up irrigation systems to restore their soil and put an end to the Dust Bowl, destructive farming practices persist. In the last 30 years alone, one-third of the world’s usable land has been severely degraded, according to the United Nations. Another 75 billion tons of fertile topsoil is lost every year.

An Oxford University–led study published in the journal Science last fall noted that “even if fossil fuel emissions were eliminated immediately, emissions from the global food system alone would make it impossible to limit warming to 1.5°C and difficult even to realize the 2°C target.”

As the researchers concluded, “major changes in how food is produced are needed if we want to meet the goals of the Paris Agreement.”

FEDS INVEST IN CLIMATE-SMART FARMING

Federal estimates reckon that Canada’s crop and livestock farms are responsible for 10% to 12% of Canada’s overall carbon footprint. Part of that comes from fossil-fuel-run farm equipment; another chunk comes from methane produced by cows and liquid manure (used on intensive livestock farms); a large portion comes from petrochemical-based inputs, especially nitrogen fertilizer, which releases nitrous oxide, a greenhouse gas that’s 300 times more potent than Co2.

The task at hand is to turn those farm fields back into carbon sinks. A coalition of 20,000 conventional and organic farmers asked the feds to invest $300 million in the 2021 budget to help farmers embrace climate-friendly practices, such as planting cover crops, reducing nitrogen fertilizer and rotating grazing. “We calculated that with a 15% uptake of these practices on farms across Canada we could mitigate 10 million tonnes of carbon,” says Flies, one of the co-founders of the Farmers for Climate Solutions (FCS) coalition. “All of us recognize that for farmers’ sakes, we need more profitable and resilient farms, and for the climate’s sake, we need to reduce our emissions and be part of the solution.”

“All of us recognize that for farmers’ sakes, we need more profitable and resilient farms, and for the climate’s sake, we need to reduce our emissions and be part of the solution.”

–Gillian Flies, Farmers for Climate Solutions

In the spring, Marie-Claude Bibeau, Minister of Agriculture and Agri-Food, signalled that the ministry was on board, announcing that Canada would plow $185 million over the next decade into a new Agricultural Climate Solutions program.

In March, the Trudeau government unveiled draft regulations for its Greenhouse Gas Offset System, specifying that “farmers who reduce or remove GHG emissions through regenerative agriculture practices … may be able to generate offset credits which can then be sold, providing a financial incentive.”

It’s all part of Canada’s $350-million investment over 10 years to help the country’s agri-food sector “meet our emission targets and capture new opportunities in the green economy,” including $165 million in the Agricultural Clean Technology Program, $10 million to get farmers off diesel, and $60 million to protect existing trees and wetlands on farms in the latest federal budget. There’s also a proposed national – albeit so-far voluntary – target to reduce synthetic fertilizer use by 30% below 2020 levels.

All these moves should incentivize more farmers to implement regenerative practices, says Gabrielle Bastien, founder of Quebec-based Regeneration Canada: “The federal budget announcement is great news for the regenerative movement.”

Canada isn’t alone. France has taken a leadership role in using soil to combat climate change since hosting COP21 in Paris in 2015. Recently, the Biden administration signalled its support for regenerative agriculture as part of its response to the climate crisis. Across the pond, Prince Charles backed the movement in an op-ed for The Guardian in May, saying, “We must ensure that Britain’s family farmers have the tools and the confidence to meet the rapid transition to regenerative farming systems that our planet demands.

GROWING REGENERATIVE IN THE WILD WEST OF CARBON CREDITS

There’s no hard data on exactly how many regenerative farms exist in Canada or globally, but what’s certain is that there currently aren’t enough of them to meet corporate pledges. Companies like Wrangler, Kering and others are posting global call-outs to farmers, issuing grants to those who want to participate in regenerative pilot programs. PepsiCo says it’s investing US$10 for every acre that farmers convert to regenerative.

The challenge now is getting everyone to agree on what qualifies as regenerative, particularly in the wild west of carbon credits and net-zero pledges. At this point, there’s no universal standard for regenerative agriculture, though food policy guru Wayne Roberts told Corporate Knights before he died earlier this year that’s part of what he appreciated about regenerative agriculture: its “open-endedness, its lack of clear, binding and dogmatic definitions, its openness to what good people can do as they try to accomplish what’s possible.” He added, “It avoids the problem of turning the perfect into the enemy of the very good, which has been the bane of social change movements for a century.”

A wide array of farm movements currently unite under regenerative agriculture’s banner – including tree-hugger favourites like permaculture and moon-cycle-aligned biodynamic farms that are free of chemical inputs, and, increasingly, large conventional farms experimenting with “regen” basics like no-till and cover crops.

More than a third of U.S. cropland is now considered no-till, according to U.S. Department of Agriculture statistics, with a small but growing number of farmers trying their hands at planting cover crops, which keep carbon from escaping from bare soil while pulling atmospheric nitrogen into the earth, where it acts as a natural fertilizer.

Trey Hill, a third-generation corn and soy farmer on Maryland’s Chesapeake Bay, thought it was all a bunch of “environmental BS” but decided to take up the state of Maryland’s offer to pay farmers to plant cover crops on bare fields two decades ago.

“I thought it was greenwashing,” he said during a webinar on soil carbon sequestration, organized by the U.S.-based Business Climate Leaders, in May. Until he saw a dramatic difference between two fields. That spring, his business-as-usual fields were unplantable, while the ones green with cover crops left him stunned – they were ready for planting far earlier. “We realized everything we had been taught … was having to be rethought.”

“We realized everything we had been taught … was having to be rethought.”

–Trey Hill, a third-generation corn and soy farmer

Hill now grows a variety of clover, rye, lentils, radishes and turnips in his cornfields as sequestration and regeneration agents. Fast forward to early 2020, when Hill became the first American farmer to participate in a national carbon credit system set up by a Seattle start-up called Nori. Last year, Hill was paid US$115,000 for practices that had sequestered more than 8,000 tons of carbon in the soil over five years. If he can demonstrate that his 10,000 acres are able to store an additional ton of carbon per acre each year, he could pocket another $150,000 annually. Nori’s not alone. Another agri-tech start-up, Indigo Ag, has stated that it hopes to pay regenerative farmers to capture a trillion tons of carbon dioxide from the air, selling offsets to companies like Maple Leaf Foods.

Questions remain about the efficacy of carbon offsets in the climate fight. Can regenerative farms legitimately sequester trillions of tons of carbon dioxide? Are carbon markets for farmers worth the gold rush – both for farmers and investors? Or will buying farm offsets essentially provide cover for heavy-emitting companies to keep polluting? There’s a great deal of scientific debate – and ongoing research in field labs – around just how much carbon soil can sequester, with a growing number of scientists cautioning that regenerative advocates may be overselling soil’s ability to absorb the world’s carbon pollution and effectively reverse climate change.

Sitting on his old family farm half an hour south of Saskatoon one morning in May, Darrin Qualman, director of climate crisis policy at the National Farmers Union (NFU), emphasizes that regenerative farming is “fantastic” at revitalizing soil health and increasing biodiversity and notes that “if we farm better, including regenerative, we can put most of that carbon that farming has released since we plowed the Prairies back in the soil.” That said, he adds, “some suggest you could use soils to suck all of the CO2 from industry, transport, coal and oil out of the atmosphere in decades, and that’s fanciful at best.” It’s a miscalculation that he calls “a potential civilizational error.

DITCHING THE CHEMICAL TREADMILL

Beyond the carbon debate, internal discussions remain over whether chemical pesticides and synthetic fertilizers should be permitted by regenerative farmers. On his Maryland farm, Hill, like many conventional regenerative farmers, uses chemical herbicides to “terminate cover crops” before planting, but he tells the webinar audience that he’s managed to lower his herbicide rates. One poll found that 92% of no-till farmers planned to use the chemical herbicide glyphosate to keep weeds in check and tamp down cover crops without uprooting them. Which helps explain why agrochemical giants like Bayer (owner of Monsanto) and Syngenta are chatting up the benefits of climate-smart regenerative techniques. Bayer says that while it’s paying U.S. farmers to try no-till and cover crops to sequester carbon, farmers aren’t required to purchase Bayer’s “industry leading crop protection” products to participate in the Bayer Carbon Program. Nonetheless, no-till is undeniably good for business.

“Some suggest you could use soils to suck all of the CO2 from industry, transport, coal and oil out of the atmosphere in decades, and that’s fanciful at best.  [It’s] a potential civilizational error.”

–Darrin Qualman, director of climate crisis policy at the National Farmers Union

Regenerative practitioners, however, say that if farmers continue to incorporate a wide variety of regenerative techniques, they should be able to cut back naturally on their chemical inputs. That’s one reason why regenerative agriculture is said to save farmers money. One study published in 2018 looked at 20 corn farmers and found that nearly a third of conventional farmers’ gross income went toward external inputs, compared to 12% in regenerative fields.

The NFU and FCS, as well as the feds and others, seem to agree that the most critical factor is getting farmers to reduce their nitrogen use. “The big piece that’s driving up farm emissions is not farm fuel use or cattle or anything else. It’s nitrogen,” says Qualman, pointing out that the energy needed to create, transport and apply one tonne of natural-gas-derived nitrogen fertilizer is nearly equal to two tonnes of gasoline. Canadian farms have tripled its use since 1980. Qualman’s 2019 climate report for NFU outlines how farmers have been pushed to adopt a maximum-output, maximum-input production model contingent on pumping degraded soils full of increasingly pricy fossil-fuel-derived fertilizers and pesticides. “Two things happen when farmers become overdependent on purchased inputs: emissions go up and net incomes go down.”

Qualman says he’ll gauge just how serious companies are about both their regenerative and climate commitments by whether they’re driving absolute reductions in nitrogen use

IT’S A HONEY OF AN O

In March 2019, General Mills launched its first regenerative agriculture pilot as part of a pioneering pledge to make one million acres (or 20% to 25% of its ingredient sourcing supply) regenerative by decade’s end. It’s now in its third summer of a three-year pilot consisting of 45 conventional and organic oat growers in the Northern Plains of North Dakota, Saskatchewan and Manitoba.

“We’re doing baseline soil measurements in those fields, sampling organic matter in the soil, as well as measurements around insect and bird diversity and water infiltration [in addition to] soil measurements for carbon sequestration,” says Tom Rabaey, a senior agronomist overseeing the pilots for General Mills. They’re also working with researchers at the University of Manitoba and Saskatchewan who are measuring the GHG-sequestering potential of cover crops.

Rabaey explains how General Mills had been focused largely on carbon footprint analysis and efficiency gains until it started talking to The Nature Conservancy and the Soil Health Institute about the importance of soil health in building resilience in the face of climate change. “Regenerative agriculture is really the lever to help us meet our GHG goal, but [it’s] also a way for us to maintain our supply chain resiliency where we buy our ingredients,” including oats from the Canadian Prairies that go into products like Cheerios, Nature Valley, Annie’s and Cascadian Farm Organic.

“Times were really tough, and farmers were throwing all their income on more inputs, more fertilizer, more pesticides, more efficiency gains, more output per acre.”

–Tom Rabaey, a senior agronomist, regenerative agriculture pilots, General Mills

“Times were really tough, and farmers were throwing all their income on more inputs, more fertilizer, more pesticides, more efficiency gains, more output per acre. We were hearing that,” Rabaey says.

General Mills isn’t point-blank asking farmers to reduce nitrogen and pesticide use, but Rabaey says many farmers in the pilot are doing so on their own. “Usually after the second, third or fourth year, we’re finding that growers start to make those cuts themselves.”

Whether their approach will get nitrogen use down by 30% in line with proposed federal targets is still up in the air. The official figures will be released after this season of data collecting.

BEYOND ORGANIC

While researchers across the continent refine their soil carbon measurement techniques, a handful of certifications have cropped up offering verifiable standards for regenerative farmers. The Soil Carbon Initiative (SCI) cites Danone and Ben & Jerry’s as partners. On the organic side, Dr. Bronner’s, the Rodale Institute, Nature’s Path Organic and Patagonia helped launch a regenerative organic certification (ROC) last fall. The ROC seal takes organic as a baseline but adds clear standards for a living wage and grazing livestock welfare in addition to a whole host of soil-building requirements.

Among their first products on shelves: certified organic regenerative oatmeal by B.C.-headquartered Nature’s Path. “As demand increases, our plan is to transition more products to ROC certification,” says Samantha Falk, director of communications for the cereal company.

Back in Creemore, Flies is working on making The New Farm the first certified regenerative organic vegetable farm in Canada. After that? “We want to train 10,000 farmers as leaders.”

“My dream is we can support farmers to be a part of the solution to climate change,” Flies says. “We have a huge opportunity here to improve livelihoods of our farmers, improve the quality of our food and sequester carbon all at once, if we do it right.”

COMPANIES COMMITTING TO GOING REGENERATIVE

Patagonia: The green pioneers have been spearheading a certified Regenerative Organic seal with the Regenerative Organic Alliance and using certified ingredients to make cotton T-shirts and the like.

Timberland, Vans and NorthFace (VF Corp. companies): All main materials are to be recycled, regenerative or renewable by 2025. Timberland is currently piloting a regenerative rubber supply.

PepsiCo: The company says all seven million acres of PepsiCo’s farm footprint will be regenerative by 2030, more than 500,000 acres in 2021.

General Mills: In 2019, General Mills announced its goal of having one million acres be regenerative by 2030.

Kering: Gucci’s parent company is funding the transition of one million hectares of land to regenerative practices with Conservation International, as well as one million in protected habitat “outside of its direct supply chain.”

Nestlé: The Swiss giant that purchases 1% of the world’s agricultural output expects to source more than 14 million tons of its ingredients through regenerative agriculture by 2030.

Danone: Its North American regenerative soil health pilot, now in its third year, has 82,000 acres enrolled, with a goal of reaching 100,000 acres by 2022.

Wrangler: The clothing manufacturer is launching a Retro Premium “Regenerative Jean.” It has invited farmers from around the world to submit documented evidence of improved soil health to be considered for inclusion in the special collection.

Cargill: The food giant is supporting farmer-led efforts to adopt regenerative practices on 10 million acres of cropland in North America.

Illycaffè: The Italian company is transitioning its entire network of coffee farmers to “virtuous” regenerative agriculture by 2033, its 100th anniversary.

Adria Vasil is the managing editor of Corporate Knights and the bestselling author of the Ecoholic book series.

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