Amazon has quit carbon offset standards that its founder Jeff Bezos helped to fund, opting instead for a new standard that it will develop.
According to a Reuters report, citing the online retail giant, Amazon will devise a new standard for verifying the quality of carbon offsets that it needs in order to hit its net-zero targets. The new standard will cover reforestation and agroforestry, the report said.
Carbon offsets are a popular tool in the energy transition. They essentially allow the company that buys them to emit a certain amount of CO2 because it would be offset by the existence of a rainforest, grassland, or another ecosystem that absorbs carbon dioxide.
To make sure these offsets do indeed lead to lower emissions, Jeff Bezos’ Earth Fund financed the creation of the Science Based Targets initiative—a body tasked with designing standards for carbon offsets.
These standards originally did not envisage carbon offsets being used by companies as a way of reducing their own Scope 3 carbon emissions—the emissions generated through the use of a company’s products or services. However, earlier this year, the body was apparently pressured into changing its stance on the matter.
The change did not last long after the SBTi’s employees revolted, prompting a quick reversal of opinion from its leadership.
Since Amazon was materially interested in being able to use carbon offsets to neutralize its emissions, the move to devise its own standard was anything but unexpected given the size of the company.
So, now it is working on Abacus, which would be an alternative to the standards developed by another organization that Amazon has been funding: the Integrity Council for the Voluntary Carbon Market.
“We want to ensure that every credit investment has a real, conservatively quantified and verified impact on emissions,” James Mulligan, head of Amazon’s carbon neutralization, told Reuters.
By Irina Slav for Oilprice.com
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