Olympian Offsets

Target Neutral’s big Olympic campaign went live last week – and I imagine most people will have seen the big new advertising campaign that BP has launched to encouraging people to sign up.

Offset schemes are somewhat controversial at the best of times. Add in the additional elements of BP and the Olympics, and you’ve got a pretty rich mix. And I’ve got more than a passing interest in this, as I chair both the Assurance and Advisory Panel for Target Neutral and the Sustainability Ambassadors for London 2012.

I am, therefore, bound to be a little biased, but I think this is really good for the Olympics, good for the cause of offsetting – and good for BP, which certainly needs a few ‘good things’ associated with it at this particular time. 

On the offsetting front, Forum for the Future has always had a pretty robust line: just so long as the individual or organisation investing in an offset is doing it as part of an integrated carbon management strategy – based on the increasingly familiar carbon hierarchy of avoidance (don’t use energy if you don’t need to), efficiency (use what you have to use as efficiently as possible) and greening (make sure that as much as possible of what you’re using comes from renewable energy ) – then offsetting is both legitimate and really valuable. 

Historically, a number of NGOs have been pretty snotty about offsetting, but as standards have improved, assurance around what’s being delivered has been tightened up, and various dodgy scams exposed, there’s now a much wider acceptance that offsets have their place in that carbon management hierarchy. But they’re still not exactly enthusiastic about it, and tend not to promote offset schemes actively – leaving most people pretty confused about whether they should or shouldn’t be offsetting themselves. 

BP set up Target Neutral nearly five years ago, long before the company’s current woes, and it has stuck with it since then. As a Sustainability Sponsor for the 2012 Olympics, and the official ‘offset partner’, it wants to use Target Neutral to set a new world record for the amount of travel-related CO2 being offset from a major sporting event of this kind. And it could be a pretty big number: if all the spectators travelling to the Games signed-up, the London Organising Committee for the Olympic Games (LOCOG) reckons that as much as 400,000 tonnes will need to be offset.

LOCOG is obviously doing a lot more to reduce emissions of CO2 and other greenhouse gases from other aspects of running the games, just as the Olympic Delivery Authority has done throughout the construction process. But spectator travel is obviously a huge part of the overall carbon footprint.

So what are the projects that Target Neutral will be investing in to avoid emissions equivalent to those 400,000 tonnes?  There’s one project in each of the five regions which the Olympic Games is based on:

• For Asia, a biomass scheme using rice husks in the Hunan Province in China;
• For Europe, a brilliant scheme on a big landfill site near Ankara in Turkey;
• For North America, a methane and renewable electricity scheme from dairy farming in Wisconsin;
• For South America, a biomass scheme producing high quality briquettes in Rio de Janeiro in Brazil;
• And for Oceania, a big wind power scheme in New Caledonia.

And all of them are officially verified under one scheme or another – as signed off by our Assurance and Advisory Panel.

That’s what “offsets done well” are all about. And I don’t think people should be too cynical about BP being the company that stands behind Target Neutral. None of us on the Panel would have signed up to help BP with this unless Target Neutral was more than just another offset scheme. The emphasis is placed on “reduce and replace” just as much as on the actual “neutralise” bit.

Check it out for yourself on the TN website: www.bptargetneutral.com

In short, I think this is great. And if for some reason you think that BP is somehow ‘inherently more wicked and irresponsible’ than any other oil and gas company, then you’re probably not going to see offsetting your emissions through Target Neutral (regardless of whether or not you’re travelling to an event at next year’s Olympics) as a top priority. Otherwise, I just don’t see what the objection might be.

Image: http://www.bptargetneutral.com/