Investigations by the Guardian and SourceMaterial brought damning and destabilising indictments of the carbon offset market; harnessing academic conclusions, the reports echoed that leading certifier Verra has approved carbon credits which either do not match the carbon claimed to be reduced or removed from the atmosphere, or which have no genuine carbon reduction.
The legal sector must face this challenge as both advisors to offset projects and corporate carbon-credit purchasers, and as credit consumers themselves. In client work and internal strategies, law firms lean heavily on the carbon credits issued from climate mitigation projects to make significant claims of ‘carbon neutrality’, declared where credit purchases help finance a mitigation project which can offset carbon corresponding to the buyers’ operational emissions. Similarly, providing advice for carbon reduction and removal projects on the issuance of credits is an increasingly fertile area of client work for firms.
