Opportunities to blend our International and Australian Market
The ability to choose and blend Australian and international carbon credits has provided for a remarkably successful voluntary sector that has evolved greatly and is generating substantial climate benefits. The availability of high integrity international carbon credits and their eligibility under climate active has been a significant factor in both enabling Australian businesses to blend portfolios of Australian and international carbon credits to meet market needs and their own considerations and ensuring businesses and organisations seeking to achieve Climate Active Certification are not priced out of doing so.
International standards have, in many ways, led the way in the continual development of carbon credit integrity and quality. International standards including the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM), Verified Carbon Standard (VERRA) and the Gold Standard address the importance of integrity through a well-established and strong baseline for the development of procedures for project validation, verification, and auditing.
Alignment between carbon credit schemes improves market certainty, provides investor confidence, and increases transparency. This contributes to enabling businesses to mix-and-match between different standards, locations, and methodologies making carbon markets more efficient, thus benefiting Australian businesses.
The issuance of carbon credits to a project is not something which these standards take lightly. A project must clear a number of hurdles ensuring, among other requirements, additionality, permanence, measurability and leakage avoidance before it is registered. When a project is proposed, it is listed on the applicable standard’s website. However, these projects, often in the early stages of their planning and development, have not been certified nor approved by the standard. At this point in time the standards (e.g., Verified Carbon Standard) have only received communication from the project developer of their intention to develop the project. A project which does not meet the requirements of the standard will not be registered under the standard.
Furthermore, even once a project has been registered this does not guarantee the project will be issued credits. Instead it provides the project developer the opportunity to submit, at the correct time, monitoring reports, which are then audited and verified and if found to meet all the standard and methodology requirements accurately will then be issued carbon credits. We fully support the maintenance of high integrity and rigorous validation auditing processes by Verra and other international offset registries.
The opportunities presented by international offsets are numerous. These projects transform economies and livelihoods and enable Australia to align its actions with its obligations as a signatory to the Paris Agreement. The key international schemes from which TEM sources carbon credits address climate change impacts and include provisions to address issues of permanence, additionality, measurement, reporting and verification.
Climate change is a global consideration, and at TEM, we believe both International an Australian markets enable a breadth of scale required to effectively and efficiently change the planet, for the good.