One of Australia’s biggest green market investors has backed concerns about the integrity of a large swathe ofGreenCollar and a research team that includes former Clean Energy Regulator watchdog Andrew Macintosh have signed a joint submission to an independent review of the Australian Carbon Credit Unit market by former chief scientist Ian Chubb.
“When being applied to offset the impact of emissions, carbon offsets are a high-risk environmental policy instrument and should only be used where there is high confidence that the credited abatement is real and additional ,” they wrote.They said the regulator should only credit abatement that is “‘unlikely to occur in the ordinary course of events’ and to be supported by ‘clear and convincing evidence’, and for all the assumptions, projections and estimates in methods to be ‘conservative’.
“While reducing grazing pressure can result in increased tree and shrub cover in these landscapes, from a carbon sequestration perspective this effect is small relative to cyclical climatic drivers,” they said. “We need a strong domestic carbon market and I believe we have one, and what policy levers we need to put into the detailed design to help us best manage that is still something that we’re working through.”