There’s a massive problem with airline offsetting schemes
Anyone who has booked a Qantas flight in recent years will be familiar with the “fly carbon neutral” tick box at checkout. It provides you the option to contribute a few dollars to conservation projects and gives you the impression that by doing so you have somehow neutralised or compensated for the fossil fuel emissions from your flight.
But in March this year, this was one of a number of green claims made by KLM airlines that was found to be misleading by a Dutch court, and now more than 20 airlines in Europe are under scrutiny from regulators for similar claims.
According to climateinthecourts.com “Climate-related marketing claims based on offsetting or compensating activities are increasingly coming under legal scrutiny. Just last year, for example, courts in Sweden, Germany, and Austria ruled that these types of claims were misleading to consumers.”
The scientific evidence is clear that a tonne of carbon sequestered into land is not equal to a tonne of fossil fuel carbon emitted into the atmosphere due to well-established impermanence of sequestered carbon, alongside the known integrity issues of the voluntary carbon credit market.(1)
These programs draw a false equivalence between carbon emitted through the burning of fossil fuels, which stays in the atmosphere permanently and carbon stored in land or forests, which is far less permanent. Carbon from the burning of fossil fuels has a very long lifetime in the atmosphere – 40% of carbon remains after 100 years, 10-25% remains after 1,000 years, and up to 20% after 10,000 years.(2)
Source: Climate Analytics
Carbon sequestered or stored, say in forests, is at risk of being released through logging and wildfires – risks to permanence of carbon removals from fire are also increasing due to the worsening impacts of climate change.
Derik Broekhoff, a senior scientist at the Stockholm Environment Institute and author of an expert report underpinning the KLM case says that ‘carbon neutral’ is not the same as ‘zero emissions’.
“Using carbon credits cannot turn an unsustainable flight into a sustainable one, and consumers still need to be mindful of their travel choices,” said Broekhoff. “It is not accurate for airlines to claim that purchasing carbon credits will compensate for fossil fuel emissions if those emissions are outside Paris-aligned decarbonisation trajectories.”
Roughly 1 in 10 Qantas passengers choose the ‘fly carbon neutral’ option – which is one of the most successful airline offset programs in the world. Consumers would be forgiven for believing that opting in to ‘fly carbon neutral’ means your flight won’t contribute to climate change.
We have asked the ACCC to investigate whether Qantas’ representation of offsets in this way has the potential to mislead consumers into thinking that by opting in to 'Fly Carbon Neutral’ and offsetting their flight means their flight is ‘sustainable’ and makes no significant contribution to climate change.
Sources:
The Guardian, ‘Revealed: top carbon offset projects may not cut planet-heating emissions’ (19 September 2023)
Climate Analytics, ‘Why offsets are not a viable alternative to cutting emissions’ February 2023
