60 second guide to... Additionality
Simpler than it sounds, additionality is the acid test of carbon offsetting projects
When weighing up the pros and cons of carbon offsetting, the notion of additionality becomes crucially important.
What is additionality?
When you offset a flight (or anything else, for that matter), you are giving money to a company, which invests it in projects designed to reduce future emissions or remove CO2 from the air.
But what if those reductions would have been made anyway, regardless of your contribution? For offsetting to be truly effective, these cuts need to be “additional” to anything that would have happened in the normal course of events.
How does additionality work?
For example, take an offsetting project that involves distributing low-energy light bulbs in a developing country, thereby reducing future energy consumption. The carbon savings would only be “additional” if most of the recipients wouldn’t have acquired low-energy bulbs by some other means, such as a local government drive to reduce pressure on the electricity grid.
If that happened, the bulbs distributed by the offset company would stop being additional, since the energy savings would have happened even if the offset project didn’t.
The problem with additionality is that it can be almost impossible to prove with absolute certainly. After all, no one can be completely sure what will happen in the future or what would have happened if a project had never existed.
Guarantees
Partly because of the difficulty of ensuring additionality, many offset providers guarantee their emissions savings. This way, if something happens to make one offset project “non-additional” (such as the government giving out low-energy light bulbs), then the provider promises to make up the loss via another project.
As the offset market grows, some companies have enough capital to invest in projects speculatively: they fund an offset project and then sell the carbon savings once the cuts have actually been made. This avoids the difficultly of predicting the future.
The Clean Development Mechanism
The concept of additionality has its roots in the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM), the carbon-trading system built into the Kyoto Protocol. The CDM allows developed countries to pay for carbon cuts in developing countries instead of making more expensive emissions reductions at home.
For example, a rich country struggling with its Kyoto targets might fund a hydroelectric station overseas. For this or any other project to be approved under the rules of the CDM, the carbon savings must be shown to be additional. In other words, it can’t be a scheme that might have been run anyway.
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