We’re going back to basics. In a new series of explainer articles, we’ll return to some of the key ideas and issues underlying our work to reduce the art sector’s environmental impact. This week, ahead of the launch of our Strategic Climate Fund campaign, we’re tackling the problems associated with conventional carbon offsetting.

Carbon offsetting is commonly used by individuals and organisations across the world to ‘cancel out’ emissions. But carbon offsetting schemes are coming under increasing scrutiny, and concerns about the effectiveness of carbon offsetting are growing.

So what exactly is the problem with carbon offsetting?

Conventional carbon offsetting means paying someone else to reduce or remove emissions that will ‘cancel out’ your own.

In theory, offsetting is supposed to remove the same amount of carbon from the atmosphere that the user has emitted, meaning that users can claim that their emissions are ‘neutral’ or ‘net zero’.

Typically offsetting schemes sell ‘carbon credits’ that equate to the quantity of CO2e emitted. This money is then spent on projects that either claim to draw CO2e out of the atmosphere (such as tree planting), or prevent future emissions (such as renewable energy projects or clean-burning cooking stoves).

The problem is, it’s notoriously difficult to verify how effective these schemes are. Because offsetting is based on future reductions or removals that haven’t happened yet, they rely on estimates and predictions that can vary greatly and are based on opaque calculations or untested assumptions.

Even worse, many offsetting schemes have been linked to land grabs, human rights abuses, and the replacement of wild habitats with monoculture plantations. There are multiple examples of people - especially Indigenous peoples and those in the Global South - being forced off their lands to make way for carbon offsetting projects, in a process that campaigners call ‘carbon colonialism’.

There has been a push to certify ‘best practice’ offsets through schemes such as The Gold Standard, which require greater levels of transparency and accountability. However, even this kind of certification still fails to address the more fundamental problems with carbon offsetting.

Few offsetting schemes seem to work as planned. An investigation by Propublica in 2019 examined offsetting projects from the previous two decades and found that most had failed to deliver the reductions they promised.

Some projects had run out of funds or not reached the promised scale; others would, in hindsight, have happened anyway without the funding from the carbon credits, making the offsets redundant. Many forest plantations had failed to grow or been ruined by bad weather or bad management. A recent Guardian investigation found that 90% of the carbon offsets verified by major offsetting company Verra had not reduced deforestation.

And, even if offsets work, they’ll often take effect too late. In order to be affordable, offsetting schemes typically rely on gradually reducing emissions over decades. But we need to halve global emissions by 2030. Every tonne of CO2e we emit today starts heating the planet immediately. Planting trees that might absorb those emissions by 2040 or 2050 is little help.

If we look at the wider offsetting industry, it’s clear that offsets are being proposed on an impossible scale. The offsetting plans of just three companies - Nestlé, Eni and Shell - would require new forests three times the size of Malaysia. If you add the tree-planting commitments of energy firms BP, Equinor and all the other corporations, there literally isn’t enough room on the planet.

As well as these practical concerns, the broader culture of offsetting is creating its own problems.

Offsets are often used as an excuse to delay real action. The logic of offsetting suggests that it’s OK to keep emitting, so long as you’re creating some other carbon reduction. Big polluters use offsetting and the language of ‘net zero’ to claim that they can carry on with only minor changes to their business models.

For example, both Shell and BP have set ‘net zero’ targets that use the dubious promise of future carbon reductions to justify expanding new oil and gas extraction today - an approach that flies in the face of climate science and UN targets.

Fundamentally, offsets don’t create meaningful systemic change. By their nature, offsetting projects focus on reaching a specific amount of carbon on a balance sheet, rather than addressing the root causes of the climate crisis and driving the culture change we need.

For all of these reasons, GCC has concluded that conventional carbon offsetting is neither the fastest, fairest nor most effective way to tackle the climate crisis, and we strongly recommend avoiding offsetting entirely.

What does this mean for the visual arts?

Despite all of these issues, we still need to decarbonise and use our financial resources to support effective climate initiatives. That’s why GCC developed our Strategic Climate Fund policy. Strategic Climate Funds are an ethical climate financing model that allow individuals and organisations to fund rapid and effective climate action, without the problems associated with conventional carbon offsetting.