Offset - Mitigate your carbon footprint

Offset unavoidable greenhouse gas emissions

The everyday activities of businesses, communities and individuals create carbon emissions. The problem is that carbon emissions accumulate in the atmosphere and contribute to climate change. It is vital we all reduce our emissions, but carbon credits also play a key role in the transition to a low carbon economy.

Carbon credits allow entities to balance the scales for those unavoidable emissions on the decarboniastion journey.

Carbon credits are also key to achieving Toitū net carbonzero and climate positive certification. After measuring and reducing a footprint, users need to offset the remaining unavoidable emissions to bring the net emissions balance to zero. This is done through the purchasing, and then retiring of high quality carbon credits.

^{The Elevate carbon programme certification cycle highlighting to Go Beyond and offset optionally. Please note this is outside the assurance scope and buying carbon credits does not guarantee certification.}

What is a carbon credit?

A carbon credit is a financial instrument that represents a unit of greenhouse gases (measured in carbon dioxide equivalents or CO₂e). One carbon credit is equal to 1 tonne of CO₂e.

Carbon credits are awarded to defined projects that store, or avoid greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions in the atmosphere. Retiring one carbon credit, on a reputable registry, balances the atmospheric impact of emitting one tonne of greenhouse gases (in CO₂e).

What credits do we use?

Toitū use carbon credits from a range of projects. Toitū acknowledges there is a range of actual and perceived quality of the projects in which carbon credits originate from.  Therefore, Toitū applies due diligence checks to ensure offsets under the programme have high integrity.

We conduct due diligence checks across several features of the carbon credit project being considered for use under our carbon programmes, using a three level approach – primary, secondary, and tertiary checks.

Primary checks

Our first set of checks is to ensure alignment to the following lead practice:

• The project must be registered on a standard endorsed by ICROA, as listed under the code of best practice
• The project must meet the principles outlined in the MfE interim guidance for voluntary climate change mitigation

All projects must align to these checks outlined above. We are also looking to source from projects that are confirmed as being aligned to the Core Carbon Principles (CCPs) set by the IC-VCM (once operationalised).

Secondary checks

Our secondary checks cover more targeted features of the project, or areas of risk, and include:

• Methodology used
• Do no harm check (extra to the issuing standard)
• Adverse social and environmental impact check (extra to the issuing standard)
• Questionable/misaligned project owners check
• Questionable project type check
• Negative Media Coverage check
• Vintage check

Any items of concern identified from the checks outlined above are assessed for risk and a decision on acceptance of the project is made on a case-by-case basis.

Tertiary checks

Our final layer of checks is focussed on how the project can fit into general communications, along with brand alignment (for both Toitū and our programme participants), and maximising co-benefits.  Checks include:

• What UN Sustainable Development Goals the project addresses
• Project type and geographic location

Any items under tertiary checks are included as a value add to the due diligence assessment.

Reference to project ratings

Several ‘project quality rating’ initiatives are emerging in the carbon credit market. We are subscribed to a rating initiative, which we refer to when a rating is available for the project we are conducting due diligence checks.  The rating, along with supplementary commentary provided with the rating, is considered across relevant components of the Secondary and Tertiary checks.

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