The Earthshot Prize awards ceremony for 2022 was recently held in the United States at the MGM Music Hall in Boston, naming five winners.
Each winner was awarded Earthshot prize funding of $1.2 million to develop their environmental solution. The winning participants were from Kenya, India, Oman, the UK, and Australia, with five categories available.
The five Earthshot Prize 2022 winners were selected for five categories, each representing a specific global environmental challenge. The five categories are:
Restoration and Protection of Nature,
Air Cleanliness,
Ocean Revival,
Waste-free Living, and
Climate Action.
These five categories were after the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals.
What is the Earthshot Prize?
The Moonshot challenge launched by President J.F. Kennedy in 1962 inspired the Earthshot Prize. The said challenge set out to reach the monumental goal of landing on the moon within 10 years.
Finding tangible solutions to looming environmental issues that will become critical in the next few years is the main objective of the Earthshot Prize.
Prince William and Sir David Attenborough launched the initiative in 2020 after two years of development, and the prize will run until 2030.
Five annual winners from 15 finalists, will each receive $1.2m in funding. The inaugural Earthshot prize awards ceremony was held in October 2021 at Alexandra Palace in the UK.
The Earthshot Prize Council selected the winners, a thirteen-member council of global ambassadors in various fields of climate action and environmentalism. Some of the council members include Queen Rania of Jordan, Sir David Attenborough, Prince William, and Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, the current Director-General of the World Trade Organization.
The Earthshot Prize 2022 Winners
The Earthshot prize winner for the ‘Protect and Restore Nature’ category was Kheyti. It’s an Indian startup that developed a ‘greenhouse-in-a-box’ solution to help smallholder farmers increase their yield.
Mukuru Clean Stoves won the Clean Our Air prize award. They’re to develop clean and safe cooking stoves in Africa that do not emit harmful chemicals that cause respiratory issues.
The Revive Our Oceans category winner was the Indigenous Women of the Great Barrier Reef. It is an initiative led by the Indigenous women in Australia to protect critical ecosystems around the world.
The Build a Waste Free World Earthshot Prize winner 2022 was Notpla. The firm is a London-based startup that tackles the plastic waste issue by developing an eco-friendly seaweed-based alternative.
Finally, the Fix Our Climate part of the 2022 Earthshot Prize award went to 44.01, a novel carbon removal solution that permanently stores carbon dioxide by mineralizing it inside rocks. Permanent storage of carbon dioxide has been a critical issue in recent years as part of an effort to drastically reduce carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.
Some of the 2021 Earthshot Prize winners included the Indian-based Takachar, an agricultural waste recycling initiative, and Enapter’s green hydrogen solution, the AEM Electrolyser.
Meanwhile, the Earthshot Prize 2023 nominations are currently open. And the deadline for nominations is on the 31st of January 2023. Submissions can be made via the hundreds of global official nominators for the Earthshot Prize 2023.
The Bezos Earth Fund announced grants amounting to $110 million as part of its $10 billion commitment to drive climate and nature solutions while advancing environmental justice.
The Bezos Earth Fund, founded in 2020, is Jeff Bezos’ commitment to fund entities and individuals who can deliver solutions to fight climate change and help restore and conserve nature. The $10 billion funds will be zeroed out by 2030, the same deadline for achieving the UN SDGs.
Bezos has been criticized for the amount of carbon that Amazon emits. The retail giant has pumped millions of tons of carbon into the air each year, totaling to over 71 million metric tons as of 2021. Personally, Bezos is trying to reverse that through the Fund.
Last year, Bezos pledged $2 billion towards environmental conservation. The goal is to protect 30% of the Earth’s land and sea by 2030.
Bezos Earth Fund Climate Commitment
The current $110 million funding will be for restoration efforts in Africa and the United States as well as advance climate science, monitoring, and governance in carbon markets.
Recognizing this, Bezos Earth Fund grants the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation with $30 million. The aim is to restore 1.25 million acres of land and forests in the Northern Great Plains and the longleaf pine ecosystem in the American South.
Restoration efforts at this scale can capture carbon and protect biodiversity, particularly in the most significant but damaged ecosystems in the U.S. Community leaders will be the one to design and execute restoration in those areas.
The African Forest Landscape Restoration Initiative
The Fund also awarded another $50 million to AFR100, a local restoration initiative in Africa. It seeks to restore 100 million hectares of deforested and degraded landscapes by 2030. $27.2 million of that funding is given to One Tree Planted, One Acre Fund, World Resources Institute and Realize Impact for restoring the Greater Rusizi Basin and Great Rift Valley.
The Greater Rusizi Basin is known as the ‘lungs of the world’ while the Greater Rift Valley provides habitat for critical forests in Kenya.
Kenya’s Great Rift Valley
The fund from Bezos will serve as grants and loans to projects that restore the land in the region. It will also support initiatives that provide training and monitoring to help scale up those projects. Commenting on this, Vice Chair of the Bezos Earth Fund Lauren Sánchez said:
“Locally-led initiatives can help us fight climate change and protect biodiversity globally, and we are proud to work with partners on the ground to advance these efforts.”
Meanwhile, the Fund’s CEO and President also remarked:
“Local groups are central to achieving global restoration goals. By supporting the African Forest Landscape Restoration Initiative, the Bezos Earth Fund is working to remove three critical barriers to locally led restoration…”
Those barriers include:
Building capacity and drawing on the existing expertise in the region to help restoration projects scale
Ensuring that finance reaches frontline groups
Ensuring that best-in-class monitoring systems are in place to track progress on the ground
With a $10 million commitment, Bezos Earth Fund works with the experts in climate science to give real-time attribution of specific extreme weather events. Examples are fires, droughts, and hurricanes happening in the U.S., the UK, and India.
Carbon markets play a vital role in addressing climate change. They can drive hundreds of millions of dollars to climate solutions. But high standards and strict rules are key to success.
Without them, low-quality carbon credits and unfounded greenwash claims can undermine the market’s potential to deliver billions of tons of emission reductions and removals.
This is where the Fund comes in to help address market governance and credits quality. A $11 million funding goes to initiatives that provide a label for high-quality carbon credits. Example is that of The Integrity Council for the Voluntary Carbon Market that helps buyers find high-quality credits.
And since the public sector also has a big role to take on climate action, the Bezos Earth Fund is also giving a $2.3 million grant to train public officials. The Fund partners with the Government Climate Campus, an initiative looking to close the gap in climate skills and knowledge among key government officials.
Together they will train the first 5,000 officials in the U.S., Brazil, and India across government levels. By 2025, the number will go up to 50,000 public leaders trained to reduce emissions by 50% within the decade.
In summary, here’s the list of the grants awarded by the Bezos Earth Fund:
The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) announced the launch of four programs funded with $3.7 billion to help build a commercially viable carbon dioxide removal industry in the country.
DOE, the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, & Carbon Removal
There are efforts currently done to reduce carbon emissions. But they’re not enough to bring the nation to its net zero target by 2050.
Thus, large-scale deployment of carbon removal technologies is crucial to tackle the climate crisis and meet decarbonization goals.
According to Secretary of Energy Jennifer M. Granholm:
“President Biden’s Bipartisan Infrastructure Law provides the transformative investments needed to scale up the commercial use of technologies that can remove or capture CO2… which will bring jobs to our regions across the country and deliver a healthier environment for all Americans.”
Carbon dioxide removal is a critical tool for cleaning up legacy carbon pollution that is already causing significant climate-related damages like intense floods, storms, and wildfires.
In addition, President Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) also brings substantial improvements to Section 45Q tax credit for carbon capture and storage.
As per DOE’s estimates, actions both under the IRA and the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law will lead to 40% emissions reduction against 2005 levels across the economy.
The Department’s efforts will bring benefits to communities across the United States. Here are its new carbon removal programs under the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law worth $3.7 billion.
Direct Air Capture (DAC) Commercial and Pre-Commercial Prize
The Office of Fossil Energy and Carbon Management (FECM) is responsible for the $115 millionDirect Air Capture Prize awards to bolster different approaches to DAC.
The DAC Pre-Commercial Prize provides up to $15 million in prizes to boost research and development of breakthrough DAC technologies. While the DAC Commercial Prize provides $100 million in prizes to qualified DAC facilities for capturing CO2 from the air.
Regional DAC Hubs
The Office of Clean Energy Demonstrations (OCED), in tandem with FECM, takes charge of the Regional DAC Hubs program. This is where the biggest investment from DOE goes – $3.5 billion.
The goal is to develop 4 domestic regional direct air capture hubs.
Each of them has to show a DAC technology or suite of technologies at commercial scale with the ability to capture at least 1 million metric tons of CO2 each year from the atmosphere. Then they have to show that they can store that CO2 permanently or convert it into products.
The first funding opportunity announced under this program is worth over $1.2 billion. It will be for conceptualizing, designing, planning, constructing, and operating DAC hubs. More opportunities are expected to follow in the coming years.
Carbon Utilization Procurement Grants
FECM will manage this program, which will provide grants to states, local governments, and public utilities to support the commercialization of technologies that reduce carbon emissions. The same goes for acquiring and using products made from captured carbon.
The first funding issuance will provide grants amounting to $100 million.
Bipartisan Infrastructure Law Technology Commercialization Fund (TCF)
This last program is under DOE’s Office of Technology Transitions (OTT), in tandem with FECM. It will issue a Lab Call to enhance commercialization of carbon dioxide removal technologies such as DAC. The office will do that by advancing measurement, reporting, and verification best practices and capabilities.
OTT will award $15 million to projects led by DOE and supported by industry partners from the emerging carbon dioxide removal sector.
Boosting Innovations in Carbon Removal
DOE launched an initiative called Carbon Negative Shot. The four programs above support the initiative’s goals, looking for innovation in carbon removal pathways that will capture CO2 and store it at gigaton scales for below $100/net metric ton of CO2-equivalent.
They also link with the Carbon Dioxide Removal Launchpad, a coalition of countries committed to leveraging collective resources and best practices to boost innovation and cost reductions across a portfolio of carbon removal technologies.
The coalition members, including the U.S., agree to achieve the following goals:
have at least one 1,000+ ton/year carbon removal project by 2025,
contribute to total investment of $100 million by 2025 to support demonstration projects, and
support efforts to advance robust measurement, reporting, and verification.
Since January this year, DOE has invested ~$250 million in R&D projects and front-end engineering design studies to advance carbon management approaches, including carbon dioxide removal and utilization projects.
The UN Biodiversity Conference (COP15) in Montreal seeks to reverse nature loss and restore biodiversity, but some groups suggested payments for this huge task with “biodiversity credit”.
According to a UN report, the world needs over $384 billion a year by 2025 to protect nature. That goes up to $674 billion by 2050. Biodiversity credits play a critical role to fill that money up.
The Concept of Biodiversity Credit
Biodiversity credits are patterned after the concept of carbon credits. Each carbon credit represents a 1 tonne reduction of carbon emissions.
However, things are more complicated with preserving or restoring biodiversity. There are plenty of metrics involved to track progress. So analysts can’t agree on many things.
For instance, what these credits must look like and how to use them. Some even say that the scheme may go wrong if it allows firms to buy credits as permits for degradation elsewhere.
As the debate continues during the summit, many questions remain on the table.
The hardest one to address is how to value biodiversity uniformly. There are simply millions of diverse species of flora and fauna. Plus, the biodiversity in each area is unique.
So, how should the market price the value of fungi living in a forest? Or the variety of plant species under the ocean?
No Unified Approach to Quantify Biodiversity Gains
Some organizations, including businesses and academics, believe that biodiversity credits can drive financing toward nature conservation. They have some proposals for different methodologies.
With nature’s complexity, various methodologies may exist, according to a founder of a biodiversity credit firm. For example, a well-preserved natural habitat may have to quantify only conservation costs. But an area that needs restoration may have to also measure increases in species richness.
Some don’t even propose to track the flora or fauna. They instead value efforts such as hiring rangers or implementing monitoring systems to avoid deforestation.
But there’s one approach that aims to measure and value biodiversity gains. Wallacea Trust, a UK non-profit, monitors at least 5 animal categories in an area. Each of them is valued based on how rare the species are in the country, and their abundance is estimated.
For every 1% increase in species abundance/richness or prevented loss per hectare, one biodiversity credit is generated.
Implementing Voluntary Market for Biodiversity Credits
The big question remains on why companies should buy biodiversity credits with a lot of queries around them.
In Australia, the government makes it compulsory for companies to buy biodiversity credits to offset damage caused in one area and fund preservation in another. This may be the case with EU firms with new rules forcing them to disclose impacts on nature.
But some industry groups oppose the idea of the credits letting businesses offset destruction elsewhere.
However, negotiators at the COP15 summit focus their talks on the potential voluntary markets in the private sector. They’re not after the compliance markets where biodiversity credits trading is mandatory.
The draft of the COP15 discussion also hinted at the promotion of a related scheme “biodiversity offsets”.
Outside the summit, the World Economic Forum (WEF) and the Biodiversity Credit Alliance are discussing how to set up a voluntary market. They plan to launch it next year with a system that ensures the credits deliver their conservation claims.
Having a high standard in place is critical as a policy officer from a carbon credit platform noted:
“When you can point to many examples in a market of low quality or low standards, it creates distrust and it impacts the integrity of the overall market…”
Other experts caution that biodiversity credits will allow companies to “greenwash,” or make false claims of conserving nature.
But it’s worth emphasizing that biodiversity credits do not replace governments with strict laws prohibiting nature’s degradation. According to Pollination’s CEO, Martijn Wilder, governments must compel companies to invest in biodiversity.
“Paper or plastic?” was the old supermarket question, and it still rolls around every year at Christmas. But when it comes to carbon emissions of a real or fake Christmas tree, the debate can get heated.
Specifically, there’s an intense discussion around the idea of which is better for the environment.
Trees – the real kind – are, after all, carbon sinks. Cutting one down to place it in your living room for a few weeks seems wasteful.
On the other hand, replacing something all-natural and all-organic with yet another non-recyclable, plastic imitation feels as un-green as it can get.
So, when it comes to Christmas tree carbon emissions, which is worse – paper, or plastic?
The Real vs. Fake Debate and CO2 Emissions
The debate about “environmentally friendly” Christmas trees boils down to one important stat: CO2 emissions.
On the surface, the debate seems to favor fake trees. If real trees are carbon sinks, cutting them down provides one less way to lock away atmospheric carbon. And that’s one more way to release that CO2 back into the air.
But as it turns out, things aren’t that simple regarding trees.
Also, there are nearly 350,000 acres in production for growing Christmas Trees in the U.S.; much of these productions preserve green space.
When it comes to growing Christmas trees, the time can range from 5 to 15 years to grow a tree depending on the growth conditions. But on average it takes 7 years to grow a 6-7 ft Christmas tree.
Cutting down trees sounds bad, but making them might be even worse. A closer look at average carbon emissions for both real and artificial Christmas trees paints a clearer picture.
CO2 emissions for a real Christmas tree: Keep the carbon locked away
Time for the headline stat: 0 kg of CO2.
That’s the amount of CO2 your annual Christmas tree releases if you cut it, use it, then chip it up (using renewable power) and spread it on your garden.
Why nothing? Because trees lock away carbon primarily in their trunks.
True, forget to water the tree after you’ve brought it in, and you’ll see needles everywhere. But even when those needles decay, the CO2 they release is negligible. It’s the trunk and branches that matter after all.
And if you grind those up at the end of Christmas, you produce long-lasting bark mulch that releases CO2 very slowly over several years as part of a natural process.
Of course, not everyone has a wood chipper around to dispose of their tree. Toss your old tree in the landfill, and the resulting decomposition (which releases methane, as well as CO2) results in about 16 kg of CO2e per 6.5-foot tree.
It’s actually better to simply burn your old Christmas tree. This is a simple one-for-one exchange, as burning the tree releases all the CO2 it had absorbed over its life – for an average Christmas tree, roughly 4 kg of CO2. Burning does not result in the extra methane emissions, making it a more emissions-friendly option.
By far the best option is to use a potted tree. Bring the same one in, year after year, or plant it and purchase a new one to repeat the process – and kickstart your own personal Christmas tree offset program.
Carbon emissions for a fake Christmas tree: Production footprint
What about fake trees?
On the plus side, there’s no methane from decomposition, and no release of CO2.
But that’s about as good as it gets. Fake trees are generally made from plastic and metal. Both of them traditionally rely on carbon-intensive manufacturing methods and account for roughly 70% of a plastic tree’s carbon footprint.
Moreover, between 80%-90% of the artificial Christmas trees sold each year in the US – somewhere around 10 million trees – are produced in China. To calculate the true carbon footprint of your average artificial tree, you also need to include transportation and production costs.
That’s why the average artificial tree carries a carbon emissions cost of around 40kg, compared to the 3.5-16kg per real tree.
At the end of the day, artificial trees are largely plastic. Oil-based production plus global shipping costs tend to result in high carbon emissions.
Real Christmas Trees: Ongoing Reforestry Offsets
To make the Christmas tree carbon emissions math work, each fake tree would need to be reused between 4-10 times before it resulted in less emissions than a real tree.
And even if that were the case, artificial trees would still take up space in a landfill, without the benefit of being biodegradable.
In contrast, for every Christmas tree cut down, around another three trees are planted each year.
Real trees result in lower shipping costs and reduced emissions from transport in comparison to artificial trees: the average real tree travels a little over 200 miles from source to final destination, while plastic trees can cover over 8000 miles on their trip from manufacturing in Asia to other global markets.
The Christmas tree industry operates as a market-induced carbon offset mechanism. Thousands of Christmas tree farms sequester as much as one tonne of carbon per acre. And trees are generally replanted as fast as or faster than they are cut.
Christmas tree co-benefits:
Supports local farmers and producers
Encourages young-growth forests (trees are typically cut after seven years
Easy to recycle
Filters air and produces oxygen while inside
Can be used in aquatic or riparian environments to encourage diversity
The result is a carbon-neutral industry that removes nearly as much CO2e as it emits. Even The Nature Conservancy acknowledges that the real Christmas tree industry plays a vital role in the push for forest restorations that could account for 30% of the carbon emissions reductions the world desperately needs.
Not to mention that the great Christmas tree industry employs ~100,000 people in 15,000 farms across the U.S.
But in the end, the answer is pretty simple; when it comes to Christmas tree carbon emissions, pine beats plastic every time.
Amazon is testing out its new carbon credit label called ABACUS Verified Carbon Unit (VCU), which goes above and beyond Verra’s methodology and will focus on ensuring additionality, leakage, and durability standards in the market.
Trust has been at the center when dealing with the issues confronting the carbon market. Some buyers of carbon credits are afraid that they will not receive the emissions reduction those credits promise.
Same with other products, there are good and bad carbon credits. The good ones are from projects that result in actual and real removal or avoidance of carbon. The bad ones don’t deliver real and positive impacts.
The challenge for both buyers and sellers is to spot the difference. And this is what the new carbon credit label of Amazon will try to address.
Amazon ABACUS Verified Carbon Unit (VCU)
In partnership with Verra, Amazon unveiled their plan to create a label that they claim to bring a higher standard of producing carbon credits back in July.
The carbon credits the system will generate will satisfy additional standards already required from traditional VCUs. Verra said that ABACUS is the first VCU label that came from a 3rd-party working group.
That group comprises Amazon research scientists and experts at the University of California Berkeley, The Nature Conservancy, and other organizations.
Amazon’s inspiration for creating the ABACUS VCU label is to improve public trust in the environmental integrity of carbon credits. This is critical for the voluntary carbon market to grow.
The architect behind the new carbon credit label, Jamey Mulligan, gave a sneak peek of the Amazon ABACUS VCU. He said:
“It is the first carbon market label that reflects innovations in the carbon accounting itself. [We are] creating an incentive for project developers to road test new project design concepts and carbon quantification methodologies that, at the end of the day, are built to enable confidence that the credits represent what they claim.”
The new carbon credit label will focus on two project types – agroforestry and reforestation. That’s because additionality, leakage, and durability are hard to deal with in those areas. But the projects also have great potential for significant climate, social, and environmental benefits.
Mulligan noted that ABACUS will improve the story for each of those standards. And to qualify for that label, VCUs must come from projects verified by Verra’s afforestation, reforestation, and revegetation (ARR) methodology.
How ABACUS Differs From Traditional Carbon Credits
Additionality:
One way that ABACUS VCUs are different from the existing credits available on the market is how they account for additionality. The label will require project developers to consider additionality at the start of the project.
Rather, they have to track changes in the project’s carbon stock over its lifetime while comparing it continuously to a baseline. This practice uses what they call a dynamic baseline to evaluate additionality.
In Mulligan’s words,
“Essentially, projects have to outcompete matched control plots in the surrounding landscape to maintain additionality. This effectively transfers the risk of future non-additionality, from the atmosphere to where it is today, to project investors, where we think it belongs.”
Leakage:
Another way that Amazon hopes ABACUS VCU will improve the credit standard is on leakage. It happens a lot when agriculture results in indirect land use change and loss of carbon.
ABACUS will prevent that leakage by supporting projects that make the rest of the degraded land or its nearby region equally productive. This will help maintain the agricultural production rate of that location.
The new label believes that carbon removal projects must not come at the expense of food production but must be engines of food security.
Durability:
Lastly, climate solutions through nature have struggled to prove their durability or permanence. This is why buffer pools are created to cover for their potential losses due to wildfire or harvests.
ABACUS crediting will still use the same approach of pooled buffer accounts. But they will be from projects with high quality. And that tree species are better adapted to the project area.
Still on durability, the new scheme will cut down the crediting period from the standard 50 years to only 30.
Ridding of the last 20 years will have little impact on the investors’ financial outlook at the time of investment, said Mulligan. This, in fact, creates unaccredited removals that can compensate for partial losses, acting as another buffer pool.
Testing and Refining ABACUS
Though such changes in carbon crediting scheme sound promising, they need polishing. Amazon and Verra will work together to test and refine the ABACUS VCU label.
Verra completed a pre-consultation last October but ABACUS still needs testing on the ground with real and pilot carbon projects.
Plus, both organizations have to do a lot of work to ensure the success of ABACUS. And the key to that is trust and cultivating it on both sides, according to Mulligan.
A final decision on the proposed label will be due in January 2023.
Carbon offsets are one of the ways to help airlines in their race to net zero emissions. But recently, two major airlines – JetBlue and EasyJet – opted to stop carbon offsetting and focus on other ways to lower their carbon footprint by ramping up their use of sustainable aviation fuel (SAF).
With few other technologies commercially available, most airlines chose carbon offsets for their net zero strategies. According to S&P estimates, airlines will rely on offsets to decarbonize about 97% of their operations by 2025 but that will go down to 8% only by 2050.
Low carbon technologies come into play and SAF shows a promising trend.
Cutting Airlines Emissions with SAF
Some airlines now see SAF as a way to ramp up their decarbonization goals. Current estimates by the International Air Transport Association (IATA) show that SAF will account for about 65% of mitigation needed by the aviation sector.
The IATA estimated that total SAF production will reach 450 million liters in 2022. That’s over a 3x increase over the 2021 production of 100 million liters.
Here’s the growth of SAF production to date as per the IATA data.
To date, over 450,000 commercial flights have been operated using SAF. And the growing number of airlines signing agreements with SAF producers sends a clear market signal that this low-carbon fuel is in demand. Two recent examples are JetBlue and EasyJet.
JetBlue Ramps Up SAF Uptake
JetBlue Airways, a major American low-cost airline, pledged to reach net zero by 2040 using six methods including SAF and a massive carbon offsetting program. The airline first used carbon offsets in 2008, using the proceeds to support projects like wind power development, methane gas capture at landfills, and reforestation.
But it recently announced that it will quit buying carbon offsets for its domestic flights in 2023 and decided to focus on using SAF instead.
JetBlue considers carbon offsets as a powerful tool that enables them to tackle emissions immediately when developing a longer-term reduction plan including SAF. The airline’s director of sustainability and ESG Sara Bogdan said in an email that:
“The time is now to maximize investment into the space [green fuel] and accelerate our uptake of SAF…”
The US carrier revealed the shift as part of its wider commitment to cutting GHG emissions from jet fuel by 50% per revenue ton kilometer by 2035 from 2019 levels. This reduction is its most aggressive near-term target, the airline said.
Yet, JetBlue is not giving up on carbon offsets completely. It will continue to buy a small quantity of high-integrity carbon credits for flying from 2024 and to offset emissions from expanding international flights. The airline will work with experts to deal with issues on carbon offsets and assess which bring the biggest benefit.
Bogdan further added that “we do see an opportunity for greater transparency from the carbon credit market.”
The airlines has been using SAF for some flights since 2020 under supply agreements with Neste and World Energy. It has also signed deals with three more SAF producers with the plans to convert 10% of its fuel to SAF by 2030.
The US carrier joins Swiss EasyJet, which in September said will ditch carbon offsetting by the end of this year. It will opt to use SAF, too, as part of its roadmap to net zero emissions by 2050.
EasyJet Shifts to SAF
EasyJet was one of the first major airlines to offset all of its emissions when it introduced the program in 2019. The company said it had offset about 8.7 million tonnes of emissions since then.
But the carrier decided to use its money to invest in new technologies from fuel-efficient aircraft to switching to greener fuels like SAF. This shift will reduce its emissions by 78% by 2050, while the 22% cut by using carbon capture technology.
The Swiss carrier’s CEO Johan Lundgren remarked:
“Our carbon offsetting programme has been the right thing to do . . . [but] you need to deal with your own operations, you cannot rely on out-of-sector initiatives. It makes much more sense to invest into direct initiatives that reduce our own carbon intensity.”
But the airline said it will still allow customers to pay to voluntarily offset their own emissions.
According to the Science Based Targets initiative (SBTi), offsets can only be used to compensate for a small portion of residual emissions that can’t be dealt with in the long term.
EasyJet’s and JetBlue’s shift to SAF contrasts with some airlines.
US carrier Delta Air Lines, for instance, spent $137 million to buy and use 27 million offsets last year. While British Airways claims that all its domestic UK flights are “carbon neutral” by offsets that cover these journeys.
As they race to net zero, airlines are using both carbon credits to offset their emissions and SAF to cut pollution directly at the core.
The rise and fall of countless civilizations are due to access to two things: water and carbon. Both are essential for sustaining flora and fauna.
When arable regions become a desert wasteland, it shifts capital and populations. The world just surpassed 8 million people, and in the next 15 years it is expected to grow by another billion people.
Being able to reverse desertification will unlock new regions for development.
While turning a desert wasteland into a lush green carbon oasis seem like a massive undertaking, it’s already happening across the globe.
First some basics.
Desertification is the long-term degradation of dryland ecosystems by human activities, indirectly through climate change or directly through bad land management or overuse.
+75% of the Earth’s land area is degraded
+90% could become degraded by 2050.
By 2050, the global economy could lose US$23 trillion through land degradation.
Globally, the world loses arable land the size of Saudi Arabia each year.
Climate change is estimated to reduce global crop yields by about 10% by 2050. Parts of Asia and MENA (Middle East and North Africa) could see their crop production cut in half.
Desertification is a causing factor in the early human migration off of Africa. They followed the water and trees, much like the animals did.
Desertification has been identified as one of the top 3 environmental challenges back in 1992.
About 1/3rd of the Earth’s land is covered by desert (as determined by precipitation). All continents have deserts, yet their types and sizes vary widely.
Deserts are frequently among the least populated places on earth since they are thought to have challenging living conditions.
The 5 Largest Deserts Regions In The World
Antarctic & Artic – 10.9 million square miles
MENA Region (Sahara, Arabian, and Syrian deserts) – 4.7 million square miles
North America’s “Big 4” (Great Basin, Mohave, Chihuahuan, and Sonoran) – 0.5 million square miles
The Sahara Desert has grown by 10% since 1920, and a third of its current size is due to climate change.
The overall MENA region is divided into the have or have nots – minerals reserves, oil reserves, carbon reserves (vegetation), and water reserves.
The region is surprisingly flush with water resources although it’s deep underground.
The overall volume of “fossil water” is estimated to be over 4 billion barrels. That is over 100 times the annual renewable freshwater resources and 20x the freshwater stored in African lakes.
To get to this will need massive water drilling programs. Libya is building the “Great Man-Made River” the world’s largest underground network of pipes and aqueducts.
To extract this water resource, it needs to be economically viable, and carbon credits help tip the scales.
Water can help turn the deserts back into arable lands, this opens the immense potential for carbon credit generation from all the new greenery.
Carbon credit and biodiversity credits can improve the quality of life (in their region).
How do you control the temperature and climate?
The MENA region was once green and lush, but over time desertification occurred. There only remains a few oases serving as a reminder of the region’s former glory.
Fortunately, turning deserts back into arable regions can happen with proper planning and implementation of technology and nature-based solutions.
To stop the “spreading cancer” known as the Sahara Desert, a massive oasification project is already underway called the “African Great Green Wall”.
It’s an ambitious plan to develop a wide wall of trees to hold back the expanding Sahara Desert.
This 8,000 km natural wonder would cut across the whole continent of Africa from Senegal to Djibouti, affecting 11 countries along the way.
If completed, it would be the largest living structure on the planet. It’s 3x the size of the Great Barrier Reef.
The hope is that the trees will slow soil erosion, slow wind speeds, and help rainwater filter into the ground.
More fertile soils will help communities across the Sahel with land grazing and agriculture.
The African Green Wall hopes to reach its goal by 2030, but with funding drying up and regional disputes, its future remains in limbo.
African Great Green Wall’s execution has not gone as well as planned, with over 80% of the planted trees have died. Researcher Chris Reij stated:
“If all the trees that had been planted in the Sahara since the early 1980s had survived, it would look like Amazonia.”
Another MENA nation that is making major moves towards bringing back arable land is oil-rich Saudi Arabia.
Not too long ago the Middle East was a tropical paradise, and Saudi Arabia is working toward bringing it back to its former glory.
Saudi Arabia is the 9th most powerful nation in the world and one of the most water-scarce nations on the planet.
Surprisingly Saudi Arabia is behind only the U.S. and Canada for per capita water consumption. The Kingdom uses 4 times as much water as it can renew. Plus, it uses 2x the water of an average nation per capita.
Major conservation efforts are at work to protect their other vital resource as water is essential for making the region green again – and to go net zero.
Saudi Arabia has also announced “Vision 2030”, a project to diversify the economy and move away from its dependency on oil.
With the proceeds of their remaining oil, Saudi Arabia is now starting to drill for their next precious resource behind oil – water.
The more water they stockpile the greener their country and economy can be.
The image below looks like an alien crop circle, but these are essentially carbon crop circles.
This “Center Pivot Irrigation” technology was developed in the US and requires less water, resources, and maintenance.
Water is pumped up from underground river channels and aquifers from depths of 1km (0.6 mile).
Each circle will be able to generate carbon credits after the soil begins to take root again and as they begin to store more carbon (and water) in the plants and soil.
To give some context, in 1971, Saudi Arabia had only 3.5 million acres of arable land (0.7% of its total land mass). But in 2020, that ballooned up to 8.5 million acres – that growth is roughly the size of Slovenia.
Yet, they will run out of water underground eventually, so they need new sources of water.
Making Water from the sea and the sky
Constructing dams can capture the rainfall surges from storms to be used later. Countries have also been exploring making their own storms using “Cloud Seeding”.
Cloud seeding works by shooting salt flares into the clouds. As salt naturally attracts water, the water particles collide with others to help with rainfall.
Saudi Arabia is also the world’s biggest user of desalinating plants which turn seawater into freshwater.
They have announced the world’s first Solar Power Desalination Plant. This cutting-edge technology is the most efficient desalination project yet.
Carbon credits are now available for desalination plants that switch to renewable power.
Scientists are even working on creating carbon-negative desalination plants, so they suck up more carbon than they emit.
The concept is to take advantage of the magnesium by-product in the concentrated brine which the desalination plant rejects. This is still in the very experimental stages, but it could show some promise in the future.
Wind & Solar
Using large-scale solar and wind farms can create microclimates.
Large wind farms mix hotter air from above with cooler air below, which brings slightly more initial heat to the ground. The turbines also interrupt the smoothness of the desert wind. This slows the wind speed and traps that heat further.
The trapped heat changes the atmospheric conditions above and can double the typical rainfall (in lab simulations).
The rain helps plants grow, and as they begin to take root, they also provide more green cover. The green cover lowers the amount of sun reflected off the desert surface. And so, it helps bring in more rain.
Solar farms can decrease the amount of sun bounced back into the atmosphere even more.
By combining large-scale solar and wind projects, has the potential to change the local climate.
And Saudi Arabia recently announce they are doubling its investment in renewables.
These initiatives will heat up the ground temperature in the remote agricultural/carbon farm areas. They’ll also produce more rainwater, making it more and more like the lush tropics.
They’re also planning to create a massive climate-controlled futuristic and green megacity called NEOM, in another region of the country. This NEOM project will be carbon neutral and net zero water – more on the NEOM project here.
With the ability to purchase and fund carbon projects across the world, it raised the question “Are local carbon credits better?”.
The World Bank, along with the International Emissions Trading Association (IETA) and the government of Singapore, launched a new carbon credit platform “CAD Trust” to clean up the market and integrate several registries.
The founding partners call the new global tracking system Climate Action Data Trust or CAD Trust. The goal is to bring transparency to the carbon credits market and aid countries to raise climate finance faster and more affordable.
President and CEO of IETA Dirk Forrister remarked:
“Today’s launch of the CAD Trust marks a significant step in the evolution of carbon markets. It will lead to the creation of a centralised, accessible and secure digital infrastructure that national governments and private businesses can rely upon as they expand carbon markets to meet their net zero goals. This system will provide the integrity and public trust necessary for scaling up investment in climate action…”
The Need for Transparency
Polluters can offset their emissions to achieve their net zero targets. Offsetting means buying carbon credits generated from projects that avoid or remove carbon from the air.
Governments have been struggling to come up with rules for trading compliance carbon credits. Still, projects are developed to produce those credits and governments are establishing registers to track them.
In the private sector, many initiatives have emerged to deliver credits for the voluntary carbon markets (VCM). Nonprofit registries like Verra and Gold Standard are accrediting and monitoring the credits.
But critics of the market continue to raise concerns over poor transparency, limited supply, and quality of the projects.
Enter the new carbon credit database and tracking system – the CAD Trust.
The Climate Action Data Trust (CAD Trust)
The CAD Trust seeks to fix those issues by integrating all the carbon credit project’s data in one place and making it available to the public for free. Its launch comes as the latest round of global talks on rules for carbon markets under the Paris Agreement’s Article 6 at the COP27 summit ended in deadlock, again.
Speculators warned that some countries are pushing for frameworks that can’t prevent double counting carbon credits towards climate goals.
Chandra Shekhar Sinha, Adviser of the Climate Change Group at the World Bank said:
“… We hope that CAD Trust becomes a critically important source of data by connecting registry systems of the voluntary and compliance carbon markets to bolster transparency and accountability in these markets to meet corporate needs and to further the implementation of the nationally determined contributions that sit at the heart of the Paris Agreement…”
CAD Trust evolved out of the Climate Warehouse initiative developed and managed by the World Bank. It’s a culmination of 3 years of work and prototyping of a series of simulations of carbon data aggregation. That involves 30 participating organizations, 11 national governments, and 58 testing sessions.
CAD Trust uses distributed ledger technology to create a decentralized record of carbon market activity. The aim is threefold:
avoid double counting
increase trust in carbon credit data, and
build confidence in carbon markets
The new initiative will engage with various governments as well as private organizations.
Their collaboration will help set the specifications for an open-source metadata system that can share information about carbon credits and projects across various digital platforms. This is to ease the future integration of multiple registry systems and make it easier for companies and countries to share data.
For instance, the new carbon credit platform will allow Bhutan to save around $1 million in market access costs. One of Bhutan’s Ministry of Economic Affairs officers said that “It really helps us leapfrog the entire learning process.”
He also added that using the CAD Trust of the World Bank means Bhutan can begin selling carbon credits in 2023. That’s one year earlier than if the nation hadn’t accessed the system.
The CAD Trust Council
The World Bank and partners also announced the formation of the CAD Trust Council. It will be in Singapore tasked to guide the strategic direction of the CAD Trust.
The Council consists of representatives from the following countries and registries:
Bhutan,
Chile,
Japan,
Senegal,
Singapore,
United Kingdom,
Verra,
Gold Standard,
American Carbon Registry, and
Global Carbon Council.
They will work closely with CAD Trust, give it strategic direction, and ensure it achieves its goals. A big part of that goal is to ensure that carbon credits are delivering promised emissions reductions.
Prices for carbon offsets in the voluntary carbon market had one of the worst days in their short history.
Nature Based Offsets (N-GEO) down over 20%.
Aviation (CORSIA Credits) down 8%.
Tech-Based Offsets down 22%.
After enjoying record-breaking carbon prices earlier in the year, liquidity is drying up in the carbon sector.
Vanguard, which oversees $7.1 Trillion in assets, also announced that they pulled out of the Net Zero Asset Managers Initiative (NZAMI).
NZAMI had 3 major goals with its initiative:
Work in partnership with asset owner clients on decarbonization goals. That’s consistent with an ambition to reach net zero emissions by 2050 or sooner across all assets under management (‘AUM’).
Set an interim target for the proportion of assets in line with reaching net zero emissions by 2050 or sooner.
Review our interim target at least every five years. Plus, a view to ratcheting up the proportion of AUM covered until 100% of assets are included.
In a statement, Vanguard said:
“We have decided to withdraw from NZAM so that we can provide the clarity our investors desire about the role of index funds… And about how we think about material risks, including climate-related risks—and to make clear that Vanguard speaks independently on matters of importance to our investors.”
Vanguard’s decision to walk out of the world’s largest climate-finance alliance marks the biggest defection to date. Earlier this year, pension firms and an investment consulting firm exited GFANZ.
After that, JPMorgan Chase & Co., Bank of America Corp. and Morgan Stanley were considering defection after Race to Zero, a UN-backed entity that underpins GFANZ, mandated members to “phase down and out unabated fossil fuels, including coal.”
Vanguard’s move was made after a “considerable period of review.” And that’s based on a desire to maintain the freedom not to restrict its investment options, they added.
Legal Risks of Failing to Meet Net Zero
Concerns on legal risks are justified because if firms fail to reach their net zero pledges, they could face serious consequences. That may be in the form of significant litigation costs, huge financial penalties, and negative publicity, according to legal advisors.
A founding partner of the NZAMI, VP of Ceres Investor Network commented on this saying:
“It is unfortunate that political pressure is impacting this crucial economic imperative and attempting to block companies from effectively managing risks — a crucial part of their fiduciary duty.”
It will be critical to see which companies follow Vanguard’s exit, or whether they maintain their commitments. And how that will further impact voluntary carbon market prices.
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