The Carbon Farming Initiative Consultation is just that: a Consultation. Your input is requested. The paper includes “Integrity Standards”. They are a list of ‘rules’ that are proposed to give buyers confidence that the abatement offsets they are buying aren’t just smoke and mirrors – that they are real. These rules include:
Additional - the emissions saved or extracted would not have happened without the offset, but are genuinely additional to other efforts.
Permanence – the emissions saved or extracted are not released for the period of the active life of the particular Greenhouse Gasses, eg. CO2 – 100 years
Leakage – the project does not create increases in emissions somewhere else that cancels out the inititial saving.
Measurable and verifiable – all activity must be accurately measured or estimated; each offset credit must stand for one tonne of CO2-e; auditing must be independent.
Conservative – assumptions, figures, and measurement must be conservative to avoid over-claiming.
Internationally consistent – methodologies and reporting practices aligned with those adopted by the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change.
Supported by peer-review science – scientific evidence submitted must be ‘peer-reviewed’ which means it has been approved by other scientists in the same field as those doing the research and that it has been accepted for publication in a scientific journal.
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