Climate compensation

With your donation specifically for climate compensation we primarily address the major impact of food on climate change, that is, on carbon emissions. Our approach to compensation of carbon emissions is straightforward. We use your donation to buy emission reduction certificates from an existing carbon compensation provider that functions in line with our principles, selected on the criteria of additionality, trustworthiness, cost-effectiveness, and ease of use. This trusted service provider allows us to reduce a well-defined and controlled amount of emissions, in line with the amount of emissions related to your compensated food. We overall adopt a rather generous approach to calculate the emissions associated with the food products you compensate, so you can be confident that your offsetting really reduces the entire emissions associated with your food, if not even more.

Food-induced emission estimates

The quantity of emissions to be compensated for the different food you offset, are calculated using life-cycle analysis methods. We use the life-cycle CO2 emission estimates for the various animal food products from the US Environmental Working Group/CleanMetrics Corp.’s study report Environmental Working Group’s Meat Eater’s Guide (for an overview of key results from the study, see Green Eatz’ Food’s Carbon Footprint). The guide considers emissions from mainstream eggs & milk. As the production of higher animal welfare products tends to be more resource intensive than standard factory farm production, we account for free-range eggs and organic milk twice the emission amounts suggested by the report for standard products. Specifically, we compensate the following amounts:

Free range eggs: 6.7 kgCO2/dozen eggs
Organic milk: 2.0 kgCO2/liter milk

The CO2 reduction

We currently work with the trusted Swiss non-profit CO2 compensation organization myclimate. myclimate implements projects that sustainably reduce CO2 emissions in different parts of the world. In December 2016, the reduction of a ton of CO2 emissions cost 24 Euros. Even when carefully selecting emission reduction projects, it is not always simple to assure perfect additionality of the emission reductions: Emission reduction projects can have unintended side-effects on emissions elsewhere, and it is not always possible to completely rule out the possibility that a reduction project would have been impossible to realize one way or the other without the currently used compensation scheme. We have therefore for now adopted the rule that we compensate twice the life-cycle CO2 emissions estimated and listed in the section above, meaning we overall pay myclimate to reduce 2 tons of CO2 per ton of CO2 associated with the food you’re compensating emissions for.

Why do we not compensate by deleting cheaper EU ETS emission allowances?

An alternative route to tentatively reduce carbon emissions would be to simply purchase European Emission Trading Scheme (EU ETS) emission certificates and to delete them, reducing therefore the emissions the European industries are allowed to emit. This approach is the route chosen by services such as The Compensators who allow individuals to conveniently offset their carbon emissions. Given that a ton worth of EU ETS emission certificates are currently – December 2016 – substantially cheaper than the equivalent ton of emission reduction by high-quality emission compensation partners such as myclimate, you may wonder: Why does foodoffset.org not simply purchase compensation through such an EU ETS-based service?

The answer is simply that the currently low EU ETS prices, and the current political reality surrounding the scheme, together make it doubtful whether one should really expect a longer-term reduction of CO2 emissions associated with the purchase and deletion of a EU ETS emission allowance. First, emission prices can be expected to be as low as they currently are, mainly if the market-wide available emission certificates have a significant chance to be not at all, or barely binding for the industry, in which case a deletion of individual certificates may fail to really reduce the amount of ETS-wide emissions. Second, the political process surrounding the EU ETS currently suggests that the  overall amount of emissions allowances distributed or sold to the firms is not as firmly given as the scheme might superficially suggest. Instead, politics seems to try to adjust the amount the scheme over time, in a way such as to guarantee that the emissions usable by the market imply that a roughly desirable emission market price results. In this case, actions such as separate emission certificate deletions for compensation may eventually be neutralized by implied political changes to the system, reducing the impact of the compensation.

These problems with the EU ETS’ workings make it very difficult to assess what the medium- and longer-term impact of any ETS certificate deletion really is, so that it currently seems more reliable to support the implementation of concrete CO2 emission reduction projects through services such as myclimate.