UC Reexamines Carbon Offset Plans to Combat Climate Change

Tuesday - December 5 2023, 01:59 UTC - 11 months ago

The University of California recently launched a research project to buy carbon offsets but came up empty-handed, prompting the entire university system to rethink their sustainability plans. The researchers recently released a website, devoted to helping other universities and organizations consider what role, if any, offsets should play in their sustainability plan. The University of California is still pledging to reduce emissions but strives to discourage the purchase of third-party offsets.

In the fall of 2018, the University of California (UC) tasked a team of researchers with identifying tree planting or similar projects from which it could confidently purchase carbon offsets that would reliably cancel out greenhouse gas emissions across its campuses. The researchers found next to nothing. "We took a look across the whole market and did deeper dives into project types we thought were more promising," says Barbara Haya, director of the Berkeley Carbon Trading Project, housed within UC Berkeley’s Center for Environmental Public Policy, who led the effort .

"And we came up almost empty." The findings helped prompt the entire university system to radically rethink its sustainability plans. In July, UC announced it would nearly eliminate the use of third-party offsets, charge each of its universities a carbon fee for ongoing pollution, and focus on directly cutting emissions across its campuses and health facilities. Now the researchers are sharing the lessons they learned over the course of the project, in the hopes of helping other universities and organizations consider what role, if any, offsets should play in sustainability strategies, MIT Technology Review can report .

On November 30, they will launch a website highlighting the array of problems they found, the strict standards they helped set for UC’s offset purchases, and the methods they developed for scrutinizing projects in voluntary carbon markets. The University of California is a huge and influential public research system encompassing three national labs and 10 campuses, including UC Berkeley, UC San Francisco, and UCLA .

Its commitment to replacing natural gas plants and other polluting infrastructure across the state highlights a model that other universities, organizations, and even cities could and should follow, says Holly Buck, an environmental social scientist at the University at Buffalo. And the fact that it has taken such a strong stance on offsets marks another blow to battered carbon markets. The basic promise of offsets is that individuals or organizations can balance out their own greenhouse gas pollution by paying others to grow trees, halt logging, or take other steps that may reduce emissions or pull carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere .

But a mounting body of studies and investigative reports has found that these projects can dramatically exaggerate the climate benefits in a variety of ways, often amounting to little more than greenwashing. The growing criticism is taking a toll. Recent data shows that demand for offsets is falling, as are prices for future contracts, a commitment to buy offsets at a set price at a later date, as some companies rethink their reliance on them .

But many corporations and nations alike continue to bank heavily on the promise of offsets. Indeed, the subject will be a hot point of debate at the COP28 climate conference that kicks off November 30 in Dubai, where national negotiators will haggle over the standards for a UN-run global carbon trading market. Haya, who has highlighted issues with offsets for two decades, says she sees three main takeaways from the research project, which sifted through more than 1,000 forest projects available in North America in voluntary markets as well as those that are sanctioned by state efforts such as California’s, the world’s sole government-run carbon market .