Are all projects verified according to established standards? The majority of our projects are verified under methodologies from established standards such as Verra. However, due to the rapidly changing pace of the market, these carbon standards do not necessarily have methodologies for nascent technological solutions such as direct air capture. Our quality assessment framework acts as a guide for approaching non-verified projects, which require finance and support to scale.
How do you monitor the project’s impact? The strength and quality of a carbon credit project lies in a third-party that certifies the project to certain standards.
Their main role is to ensure that the carbon offsets are real, additional, and permanent. They will monitor the project to ensure it delivers to the original design. Through their public registries, they ensure that a carbon offset has ownership and cannot be sold more than once.
These certification bodies also employ third parties to audit the projects to completely remove any conflict of interest in the reporting.
The various available standards, such as Voluntary Carbon Standard and Gold Standard tend to have have a focus on certain areas, such as prioritising a project type such as reforestation, or co-benefits to society.
What are the criteria for including a project in the marketplace? We use our quality assessment framework, built by our team and our technical advisory board that assesses key factors of projects including: Additionality; Measurability; Permanence; Co-benefits; External risk; and Project developer capability & resources. This provides a comprehensive and holistic assessment that helps identify the benefits and risks of different projects and informs our decision whether to include them on our marketplace or not.
Why do you include both avoidance and removal projects? We believe in high quality projects which cover both avoidance and removal projects. According to the IPCC some of the highest areas of mitigation potential to contribute to CO2 abatement are reduced conversion of forests and other ecosystems, ecosystem restoration, afforestation, reforestation alongside fuel switching.
How are the credits retired? Abatable has a registry account with all major carbon registries. Once you purchase a credit through us, we retire it on your behalf with the registry. You then receive a certificate and receipt of confirmation showing proof of the retirement on your behalf. You can then use this receipt and certificate as public evidence of your purchase.
