Since 1 April 2020, a first-of-its-kind open-access climate action guide is available for businesses, organizations, and individuals looking to increase confidence that their purchases of carbon offsets will really achieve stated climate impact claims. This guide was created by the Greenhouse Gas Management Institute and the Stockholm Environment Institute through grant funding provided by the High Tide Foundation.

This guide recognizes that institutional (as well as individual) buyers want to assure the sustainability and environmental integrity of their carbon offsets but do not have unlimited resources to do in-depth research to support their carbon offset purchase decisions. Therefore, the guide provides the required pragmatic decision-making approaches to perform robust due diligences of carbon offset projects to safeguard these meet the highest quality standards and do no harm. As one of the benchmark-setting projects, the guide explicitly mentions UPM’s Sichuan Household Biogas PoA in China on page 8 of the downloadable PDF version.

An example for potential users of the guide are airlines participating in CORSIA, the Carbon Offset and Reduction Scheme for International Aviation. As from 2021, these companies will need to surrender carbon offsets that meet applicable CORSIA eligibility rules.

“This new carbon offset guide is a very useful tool for all those businesses, public sector authorities and people seeking reliable and independent expert advice on how to compensate for their still unavoidable carbon footprint in the right way. And, of course, we are very happy as well that UPM’s Sichuan Household Biogas PoA has been mentioned as a best-practice carbon offset project,” says UPM’s Managing Director Martin Dilger.

The summary guide, “Securing Climate Benefit: A Guide to Using Carbon Offsets,” provides offset buyers practical technical guidance. A more detailed web guide is available at https://www.offsetguide.org/.

Your contacts at UPM for high-end Gold Standard carbon offsets are:

Martin Dilger, Managing Director, UPM Germany
mdilger(at)upm-cdm.eu, T: +49 89 1222197 – 50

and

Gaiai Guo, Vice General Manager, UPM China
guog(at)upm-cdm.eu, T: +86 10 6468 0500