Football festival: People take photos with the official FIFA World Cup countdown clock in Doha. Organisers have pledged to erase the event’s negative environmental impact. — AP
Specifically, they’ve said they want to buy some 1.8 million offsets from the Doha-based Global Carbon Council , bolstering a new, local organisation that signs off on the kinds of projects that fail to meet minimum standards anywhere else in the world. In the past, a solar, wind or hydroelectric plant could generate carbon credits on the basis that the additional revenue motivated developers to take steps to replace fossil fuel energy. Without the credits, the renewable energy projects wouldn’t get built.
“We came to the conclusion that only those in least-developed countries were still additional,” said David Antonioli, chief executive at Verra. The verification body introduced the ban to “make sure carbon finance was driven to where it is needed most,” he said. “We disagree on principle with the decision taken by Verra and Gold Standard to make a blanket decision on all the projects from the developed world,” Rajhansa said.Operational since 2019, GCC had until recently certified just a few projects. But the publicity from the World Cup – along with a tightening of standards elsewhere – has lifted its business prospects significantly.
Almost all are renewable energy projects and rely either on GCC’s own methodology or that produced by the United Nations Clean Development Mechanism, a scheme established in 1997 by the Kyoto Protocol that’s now considered outdated and is “de facto dead,” according to Dufrasne.