A brief guide to our Carbon Accounting Template
We have released BeZero’s Carbon Accounting Template and kicked-off a public consultation to receive feedback on its uses and application. Read this short explainer to understand what it is, why we think it’s needed, how it is useful, who it is for and what’s next.
What is BeZero’s Carbon Accounting Template?
It is a template for presenting the core carbon accounting of any type of accredited voluntary carbon market project whether it's avoidance or removal, technology or nature-based.
It is designed to be applicable to all project types in the market and capture the high-level components used to calculate credit issuance for each vintage.
The template shows a project’s core information and carbon accounting details including baseline assumption, project net emissions, leakage and risk buffer allocation - all in one place.
Who is it for?
The template can be used by project developers to report their high-level carbon accounting in a standardised and accessible format, or as a way for all other market participants as a starting point to understand and assess any individual carbon project’s key carbon claims.
It aims to be a high-level, and evolving, tool that can be used by carbon project developers of all types and sectors.
Why is it needed?
The unanimous feedback we’ve received from all market actors is that everyone would benefit from a way to structure and report project information in a standardised way.
The sooner everyone has the means to understand a project’s core claims, the quicker they can focus their energies on assessing the credibility of those claims.
We see this lack of a commonly-used reporting framework as one of the biggest but easiest to address barriers to scaling the voluntary carbon market.
How is it useful?
We hope this template will help market participants to:
Save time: remove the need for participants to duplicate the task of collecting basic information to understand how projects calculate issuance, saving valuable time.
Assess & compare fundamentals: provide a common starting point from which to interrogate and contextualise a project or projects carbon claims.
Increase information accessibility: make it easier to provide and find information that will help the market to scale effectively.
What’s next?
This is the first step in a longer journey, helping the market scale through improved reporting.
In order for this to work effectively, collaboration across industry is key. We welcome your feedback, input and expertise to help us improve this framework in due course.
We will be running a consultation period to gather feedback on the template, with all participants encouraged to provide their views by 27th January 2023. We will then share collated feedback and update on next steps in Q1 2023.