Avoidance and Removals are Equals in the Race to Net-Zero
As carbon markets grow more sophisticated, so too do questions about what constitutes a high-quality credit. Prominent registries now clearly differentiate credits that reduce or avoid greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from those that remove planet warming gases. For example, carbon projects incentivizing the preservation of forests facing harvest pressure prevent the release of carbon stored in living trees, hence avoiding carbon emissions. However, within the same project, mature trees continue to grow and sequester additional carbon, thus removing carbon from the atmosphere. In this scenario, the forest carbon project can produce both avoidance and removals credits, representing the multifaceted carbon dynamics attributed to long-term forest conservation.
Although this distinction has helped improve understanding of project-level impacts, it has also inadvertently created a divide among buyer preferences. To achieve Paris Agreement targets of stabilizing GHG emissions by midcentury, it’s clear that our world needs to simultaneously reduce sources of emissions while also removing carbon directly. This highlights the concept of reaching net-zero, where residual anthropogenic GHG emissions are counterbalanced by an equivalent amount of GHG removals. So, you might ask — which type of credit is better? The answer is both.
Seeking to provide clarity on this debate, recently published research shows that the net transfer of GHG emissions to the atmosphere is the same for avoidance and removal offsets if appropriate GHG assessment boundaries are used [1]. Furthermore, the relationship between emissions reductions and removals is interconnected, meaning that deeper reductions in global emissions also reduce the need for more removals to counterbalance the atmospheric carbon budget. It is also important to recognize that the marginal cost of abatement for avoided emissions tends to be lower, meaning that more climate mitigation is achievable in comparison to investing the same capital in permanent carbon removal technologies [1].
A key aspect of avoidance credits is the use of a counter-factual baseline— representing a plausible emissions scenario in the absence of carbon revenue to facilitate a change in practices. This is an essential element of carbon project calculations because it serves as the basis for quantifying emissions reductions from the project activity. For companies purchasing avoidance offsets, this critical detail often leads to a fair amount of confusion. As a result, some buyers have decided to favor removals, in part due to the perceived simplicity of contributing to a direct drawdown of atmospheric carbon. Eventually this trend led to the over-simplified notion that removal credits are inherently high quality, and avoidance credits are low quality. To investigate this idea, Calyx Global recently performed a side-by-side comparison of quality ratings for avoidance and removals credits, finding that only avoidance projects met the highest bar of quality in their assessment [2]. This demonstrates how both nature-based and technology-based removals can also face practical and technical complexities that impact the overall effectiveness of climate mitigation outcomes attributed to each offset claim.
Although every project has unique benefits and challenges, it’s important to recognize that both categories of carbon credits remain equally important in the broader context of achieving global climate targets.
[1] Carbon Management Journal – Demystifying carbon removals in the context of offsetting for sub-global net-zero targets
[2] Calyx Global – Avoidance vs. Removal Credits: Is one better than the other?