BASCS Work Groups
The Business Alliance to Scale Climate Solutions accelerates action through work groups.
Work groups allow members to focus on specific climate solutions. All groups strive to develop models of high-impact investments as well as open pathways for equitable local and indigenous community participation in voluntary carbon markets.
Blue Carbon
The Blue Carbon team is working to accelerate blue carbon markets via three pathways:
- Learn together to expand our collective knowledge of the blue carbon landscape.
- Enable companies to become blue carbon credit buyers by creating shared tools and guidance to facilitate efficient and impactful blue carbon investment decisions.
- Amplify investments through the Blue Carbon Buyers Alliance, a group of carbon credit buyers utilizing demand pooling to catalyze the voluntary carbon market for blue carbon ecosystem conservation and restoration.
Forests
The Forests team evolves the forest credit market by:
- Organizing expert learning sessions on forest carbon credit topics (e.g., LEAF coalition).
- Defining and addressing the top barriers to corporate investment in forests.
Forest Resources
The Tropical Forest Credit Integrity (TFCI) Guide has been developed for companies interested in purchasing carbon credits in the voluntary carbon market to differentiate between forest carbon credits. This will help move the market toward credits with high social and environmental integrity.
This Guidance is designed to assist decision-making by individuals and teams responsible for developing and implementing corporate climate mitigation and net-zero strategies.
The TCFI Guide was developed by eight authoring organizations and has been informed by an open global consultation process undertaken from December 2021 to February 2022.
DESCRIPTION COURTESY OF THE TROPICAL FOREST CREDIT INTEGRITY GUIDE WEBSITE.
Standards & Integrity
The Standards & Integrity team aims to support the development of a voluntary carbon market that ensures high quality and high integrity by:
- Curating existing guidance on standards and integrity of carbon credits.
- Organizing expert learning sessions to provide a broad understanding of standards, methodologies, and corporate guidance initiatives (e.g., VCMI and IC VCM).
- Responding to public consultations with robust and thorough feedback.
Standards & Integrity Resources
VCM Stakeholder Open Letter – While the carbon market is not a silver bullet solution for the climate crisis, carbon credits are one of the few mechanisms we currently have for funding the wide-scale conservation of natural carbon sinks and wider climate solutions. In recognizing the potential positive impacts of carbon credits, we also recognize the need for them to be more effective. We need integrity, transparency, and accountability, and that is what we are collectively working to achieve.
Founded by the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF), World Wildlife Fund (WWF-US) and Oeko-Institut, the CCQI scoring tool and assessment framework seeks to assure carbon credit quality.
As a part of the Carbon Credit Quality Initiative, the World Wildlife Fund (WWF-US), Environmental Defense Fund (EDF), and the Oeko-Institut published their quality assessment methodology.
Consulting over 350 stakeholders, the VCM Global Dialogue has served as
a platform to identify how the VCM can support national and local climate
plans, promote developing countries’ needs and preferences, and unlock
greater levels of private investment, while strengthening the rights of, and
opportunities for, local communities and indigenous peoples.
DESCRIPTION COURTESY OF VERRA.
The Taskforce on Scaling Voluntary Carbon Markets is a private sector-led initiative working to scale an effective and efficient voluntary carbon market to help meet the goals of the Paris Agreement. In its final report, the Taskforce outlines a blueprint and roadmap as well as key recommendations to build the market infrastructure needed for a functional and credible voluntary market.
In 2021, TSVCM launched a governance body, the Integrity Council for Voluntary Carbon Markets (IC-VCM).
https://files.worldwildlife.org/wwfcmsprod/files/Publication/file/54su0gjupo_What_Makes_a_High_quality_Carbon_Credit.pdf?_ga=2.168962721.1405040773.1631137168-1183493574.1631137168
Technological Carbon Removals
More on this workstream coming soon.
Technological Carbon Removal Resources
Since their first RFP, Microsoft has published several key learnings to prompt discussion and collaboration to develop a more effective global carbon removal market. One of their major takeaways is that the market lacks clear carbon removal accounting standards, particularly around the key criteria of additionality, durability, and leakage. This is one of the challenges BASCS seeks to confront.
Microsoft publishes their criteria for high-quality carbon dioxide removal and plans to evolve this criteria as the removal science and technology progresses. “This May 2022 edition provides updates across the essential principles as well as each of the carbon removal verticals, highlighted by the inclusion of a new mangrove forestation section. The document also aims to provide more specific guidance regarding harms and benefits stemming from project development, as well as how to incorporate the tenets of environmental justice into carbon removal projects.”
This guide and accompanying toolkit was developed by the Business Council on Climate Change (BC3) in collaboration with Carbon180, Anthesis, Atlassian, and Autodesk.
It is intended to help companies and organizations make sense of the dynamic carbon removals market, and start thinking about how to craft a carbon removal commitment. The main toolkit is designed as a Google spreadsheet which you can access here.