We need standards of trust
Apple wants more independent transparency of carbon offset projects, calls for more coordination and collaboration around them, and better national and international policies to support rapid scale up of carbon removal.
“We believe that a market gap still exists for a centralized transparent process to review individual carbon projects against agreed-upon standards,” the Apple white paper says. That’s as close as you can get to conceding that many of the carbon credit schemes being run and relied upon by big companies now might not actually be making a difference.
But what is at least somewhat reassuring is Apple’s stated willingness to work to improve the quality of carbon offsets, and the urgency with which it seems to see these goals. “We recognize that the current carbon markets aren’t equipped to deal with the scale and integrity of impact needed to achieve a 1.5℃ pathway and remove tens of billions of tons of carbon by 2050,” the white paper states.
“We intend to work to improve the quality of these markets. We’re also aiming to build a pipeline of projects that meet the highest-quality standards that can scale to meet the growing demand for nature-based removals. And we’ll continue to progress our goal of building much-needed solutions for high-quality engineered carbon removals to complement these efforts.”
‘Our planet is in crisis‘
Overall, this year’s Apple environmental report shows a company that has moved far beyond lip service to try to tackle the big challenge all of us share today. “Our planet is in crisis, and without urgent action on climate change, we won’t be able to keep global warming to 1.5℃, and avoid the worst climate change impacts,” Apple said.
