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Offset Reset: Raising the Bar for Offsets with Relational Thinking
Offset Reset is a CoSphere initiative that aims to raise the bar for all ecosystem-based credits or offsets, for biodiversity and ecosystem services. We aim to make it impossible to greenwash with offsets, so that offsets restore people-nature relationships and facilitate Indigenous sovereignty.
What are Offsets and Credits?
Offsets and credits are associated with flows of funding that aim to mitigate harm done to ecosystems, often in the context of carbon emissions and biodiversity loss. Offsets aim to mitigate a specific harm to an ecosystem or ecosystems, whereas credits are net-positive actions for nature that may or may not be associated with specific harms. Offsets can flow through offset/credit providers, or can involve off-site restoration by a company/organization. Credits are tradeable, and can be offset-based (restoration of a related or more threatened ecosystem than the one(s) potentially harmed by a company/organization) or non-offset based (restoration of a different threatened ecosystem than the one(s) potentially harmed by a company/organization). This means that if company A reduces their greenhouse gas emissions, for example, by X tonnes below their target emissions, they can receive credits for those avoided/stored tonnes of carbon. These credits can be sold to company B, who may not be meeting their emissions targets. Company B can then use these credits for compliance under applicable clean energy regulations.
As a system, offsetting is doing harm to people-nature relationships. In order to make systems of offsets and credits actually restorative of people-nature relationships, we propose the below six tenets.
Six Proposed Tenets to Reform Offsets & Credits
1. Always support nature
Any carbon credit with a footprint on land or water has implications for biodiversity, people, and ecosystem services and should have net positive consequences on a comprehensive set of species, habitats, and ecosystems.
2. Restore people–nature connections
Offsets must cover not only biodiversity a comprehensive set of species, habitats, and ecosystems, but also as well as ecosystem services or nature’s contributions to people (including cultural dimensions).
3. Restore before giving credit, not after
Restoration must already have occurred before credits are assigned as mitigation of harm.
4. Co-govern
Offset developers must invite Indigenous Peoples and local communities to participate safely and feasibly in program governance. This co-governance should include the identification, monitoring, accounting, and continuous engagement regarding the impacts to ecosystemsThis co-governance should include both the identification and accounting of impacts to ecosystems and associated services, and the prioritization of programs to address those impacts (the mitigations).
5. No profiteering
Individuals and firms can profit from restoration activities, but there should not be profit-seeking without restorative intent, e.g., where financiers speculate on offsets in order to profit from market fluctuations. This means that ecosystem-based offset credits should not emerge from open exchanges (like stock markets), but only from mediated transactions between buyers and regulated sellers (e.g., as with a mitigation bank mediating transactions between firms having negative impacts and communities undertaking mitigation).
6. Restore and also protect
Store or restore additional carbon and biodiversity, yes. But also, honour and support the many Indigenous and local communities who are already storing carbon by funding their ongoing protection of lands and waters, without forcing them to demonstrate (or create) a meaningful threat to those ecosystems so that protection counts as additional. We suggest that this be done on a basis of 1 for >1 and >1 (e.g., for every ton of C emitted, at least one ton of C sequestered and also safeguarded).
Figure produced by Hanaa Punja.
Where We Started
During the 2024 meeting of the North American Congress for Conservation Biology (NACCB), Cosphere hosted a panel discussion dedicated to our (then) newest initiative: Offset Reset, a project that envisions the provision of offsets and credits under a transformative relational framework, rather than a purely transactional one.
Our aim was to bring a variety of perspectives together to discuss our vision of change and begin to understand potential pathways towards improving a system largely fraught with ethical standards issues. Our goal for the workshop was to highlight research and testimony demonstrating that current standards are not doing enough for people and nature (and their relationships to one another) and push forward the conversation about what appropriate standards would look like. Beyond this, our team was keen to foster conversations between attendees imagining how their work (as biologists, ecologists, social scientists, economists, and more) may be at the forefront of reforming offsetting efforts.
What Now?
Following the panel discussion, our team got together to discuss how we aimed to integrate all of the suggestions and various uncertainties that arose during the session. We decided to invite interested attendees to become contributors to a manuscript that summarized our theory of change and suggested a course of action towards a market of relational carbon offsets and credits. With expert input spanning many disciplines reflected in this first paper, we aim to give traction to a relational framework underlying carbon biodiversity credits and offsets, which may lay the groundwork for positive changes to offset and credit programs.
A paper manuscript is currently underway at CoSphere, in collaboration with numerous collaborators spanning many disciplines and institutions.