As I was browsing the web, I came across a word that I thought was just made up. Well.... It was, but for good reason. The english language is a wonderful thing and I doubt it existed 20 years ago. In fact I don't know if it is in the OED. I'm no expert but being English, I sometimes giggle when a word is "developed" (usually by the U.S.) by giving an '..al', or '..ing,' or better still an '..ization' at the end of an existing word.

Regardless of this I bothered to find out what it was all about. It turns out to be a little bit of common sense, but one of those that makes a (energy efficient) light switch on at the back of your brain when it is written down infront of you.

Although the definition relates more to governmental levels of Carbon Emissions, the principle is just as good for us on an individual level.  So... next time you choose to offset your carbon footprint directly or indirectly, pay close attention to the projects it relates to.

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.

In other words, “is an offset additional?” means “would the project that created this offset have happened without revenues from offset purchases?”

“Business as usual” improvements, are non-additional and their corresponding pollution reduction cannot be sold as a bona fide offset.

How does additionality work?

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.

Another example, if offsets are claimed from the collection and destruction of methane at a landfill, what otherwise would have happened to that methane? If the methane would have been collected and destroyed anyway (whether because it is required by law or is standard business practice), then buying those methane reductions will not result in “additional” environmental benefit.

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.

What about Click4Carbon

Click4Carbon is dedicated to developing projects which directly impact on the environment. We're not trying to sell any Carbon Credits, and therefore in principle we're investing in Additionality.