Quality Assurance

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Since 1997, The CarbonNeutral Company has pioneered the development of standards and processes that ensure our clients’ carbon reduction programmes have credibility and authority.

Today we operate within a leading edge quality assurance programme, which enables us to guarantee the integrity of the services we offer.  As the market develops we also increasingly use third party organisations to ensure the authority and transparency of our activities.

• The CarbonNeutral Protocol - the global standard for ensuring the integrity and quality of carbon neutral programmes and enabling businesses to be certified CarbonNeutral®
• transparency and external checking of all our carbon procurement and retirement processes through the use of third party registries and auditors
• validation and verification that emissions reductions take place through the procurement of carbon validated to reputable third party standards
• founding membership of the carbon reduction industry body set up to ensure rigorous standards for the industry – The International Carbon Reduction and Offset Alliance (ICROA)
• a guarantee that for every tonne of carbon credit we sell a tonne of carbon reduction will be delivered

• an Independent Advisory Group of scientists, industry experts, NGOs and business leaders set up to advise The CarbonNeutral Company on important developments in our industry and to ensure the integrity of our business and processes.

The CarbonNeutral Protocol

The CarbonNeutral Protocol is the market leading global standard, developed by The CarbonNeutral Company, to guarantee the integrity and credibility of clients’ carbon neutral programmes and enable them to be certified CarbonNeutral®.

The CarbonNeutral Protocol is developed in consultation with and supervised by The CarbonNeutral Company’s Independent Advisory Group (IAG), a team of independent experts who ensure quality and integrity in The CarbonNeutral Company programmes.  The CarbonNeutral Protocol describes the requirements for achieving CarbonNeutral status and controls employed by The CarbonNeutral Company to ensure the correct use of CarbonNeutral logos. The Protocol also sets out the quality requirements for projects and schemes that produce offset credits that may be applied to make activities or entities CarbonNeutral.

The IAG is appointed by The CarbonNeutral Company, and consists of independent expert members, representatives of organisations interested in promoting effective action on climate change, and The CarbonNeutral Company’s clients.

Registries and retirement

The integrity of the CarbonNeutral Company’s carbon transactions are executed to the highest industry standards.  Since 2009, all carbon we procure is managed through third party registries including the Voluntary Carbon Standard (VCS) and Gold Standard registries hosted by APX and the Climate Action Reserve.  We use an independent auditor, PwC, to check and report on our systems and processes for carbon procurement and retirement, this ensures that all our carbon offsets are tracked, traded and retired in a transparent manner.  In addition, as members of industry body, ICROA, we are committed to regular audits of our transactions.

Before independent third-party registries were developed for voluntary carbon transactions, we led the market by providing our clients with a publicly accessible carbon database, audited by PwC.

Standards

The CarbonNeutral Company contracts with a wide range of offset project types in various geographical locations, all of which are validated and verified to recognised, market-leading standards, including the Voluntary Carbon Standard (VCS), The Gold Standard, the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM), the Climate Action Reserve (CAR) and the Green-e Climate Protocol for Renewable Energy. These projects are regularly audited by accredited third parties to ensure that they meet all of the quality requirements of the standard; including additionality, accurate quantification, unique ownership, permanence, leakage, sustainability standards and retirement via a publicly accessible registry.

In addition, The CarbonNeutral Company has developed a proprietary screening and grading process for all projects prior to procuring carbon from them to ensure we have a full understanding of the environmental, social and economic impacts of their activities.

ICROA

The CarbonNeutral Company is a founding member, and currently holds the position of co-Chair, of the International Carbon Reduction and Offset Alliance (ICROA), the self-regulatory body established to ensure rigorous standards for the carbon management industry and to help businesses achieve significant emission reductions. For more information, please visit www.icroa.org

Guarantee

The CarbonNeutral Company guarantees that for every tonne of carbon we sell, a tonne of carbon will be delivered. In the unlikely event that a project does not deliver, we replace it with credits from another project.

Independent Advisory Group (IAG)

The IAG is chaired by The CarbonNeutral Company’s Chief Scientific Advisor, Professor John Murlis.  Its membership consists of international carbon management experts from a broad scope of backgrounds including science, economics, business, international policy and sustainable development. Two places within the IAG are reserved for clients of The CarbonNeutral Company to ensure the company’s client base is actively involved in the development of its business activities.

The objective of the IAG is to review, challenge and advise The CarbonNeutral Company on its work in climate change, and to provide guidance on the strategic, scientific and technical aspects of the Company’s activities.  In addition to regularly reviewing The CarbonNeutral Protocol to ensure it is aligned with best practice in carbon emissions reductions, members of the IAG conduct site visits to some of our projects to personally verify the quality, and advises the company on ways in which we can continue to pioneer and innovate in our industry.

Site Visits:

Independent Project Review - CFL Replacement, Jamaica
Independent Project Review - the Karakurt Wind Farm, Turkey
The CarbonNeutral Company Response to Project Review, March 2008