The University of Cambridge's annual sustainability report for last year is now available online here, and provides details of the University's efforts towards reducing our collective impact on the planet. 4C has been working closely with the University towards a common understanding of when and where offsets should be used. To quote the report (page 34):
<...> the University itself does not currently use carbon credits for its scope 1 and 2 emissions and is instead focused on reducing these emissions in real terms by reducing energy use and transitioning to zero carbon energy sources. For certain elements of unavoidable scope 3 emissions, the University may utilise carbon credits, informed by the work of 4C.
You can find many of the recent scholarly outputs from 4C on our publications page, with recent highlights this year including:
- "Insuring against variability in the performance of Nature-Based Climate Solutions" by Rau, Keshav et al is a preprint that discusses a novel pricing strategy to balance delivery and risk tradeoffs in nature-based solution projects. (see coverage of the background to this work)
- "Global, robust and comparable digital carbon assets" will appear in ICBC 2024 this May, covering our research into robust digital methods for tracking offsets.
- "PACT Tropical Moist Forest Accreditation Methodology v2.0" is the latest version of our detailed digital methodology to assess tropical moist forest REDD+ projects using satellite imagery.
- "A call to develop carbon credits for second-growth forests" discusses the conundrum that many second-growth forests in human-modified landscapes are extremely short-lived, which has undermined their contribution to mitigating climate change and biodiversity loss.
- "Evaluating the impacts of a large-scale voluntary REDD+ project in Sierra Leone" develops an evidence base for voluntary REDD+ projects and offers a robust approach to carry out before-after-control-intervention assessments.