Resources & Glossary

B Corps are for-profit companies certified to meet rigorous standards of social and environmental performance, accountability, and transparency.

A carbon footprint measures the total greenhouse gas emissions caused directly and indirectly by a person, organisation, event or product.

Having a net zero carbon footprint. For products, services, business operations or lifestyles, this can be achieved through a combination of reducing carbon emissions at source and balancing remaining carbon released with an equivalent amount sequestered or buying enough carbon credits to make up the difference.

Land that has lost some degree of its natural productivity due to human-caused processes.

Products that do not harm the forest, whether in their production, use or disposal. These products help preserve the environment by significantly reducing the pollution they could produce.

A VCS grouped project combines multiple project locations and activities into a single, combined project.

Scope 2 refers to energy indirect emissions.

A carbon sink is anything that absorbs more carbon than it releases as carbon dioxide. Simply they are natural systems on land that suck up and store carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

Yellow butter-like oil derived from the fruit of the oil palm and used as an edible fat and for making soap, candles, etc.

Land-use systems and technologies where woody perennials (trees, shrubs, palms, bamboos, etc.) are deliberately used on the same field as agricultural crops and/or animals, in some form of spatial arrangement or temporal sequence.

Carbon dioxide (CO₂) is a colourless, odourless and non-poisonous gas formed by the combustion of carbon and in the respiration of living organisms. It is a greenhouse gas. Emissions means the release of greenhouse gases and/or their precursors into the atmosphere over a specified area and period of time. Green carbon is carbon sequestered by natural ecosystems through photosynthesis.

A market that is created from the trading of carbon credits or emission allowances to encourage or help countries and companies to limit their carbon dioxide emissions. This is also known as emissions or carbon trading. Carbon emissions trading is a way of reducing the carbon footprint of a polluter through financing offsite emissions reductions.

Products that have a net ‘regenerative’ impact on the climate. This means they take out more carbon emissions that they put into the atmosphere in its production.

The benefits people obtain from ecosystems. These include provisioning services such as food and water; regulating services such as flood and disease control; cultural services such as spiritual, recreational, and cultural benefits; and supporting services such as nutrient cycling that maintain the conditions for life on Earth.

Trees absorb and store carbon. Global forest carbon means the amount of carbon stored in the world’s forest ecosystems, mainly in living biomass and soil, but to a lesser extent also in dead wood and litter.

Greenhouse gas (GHG) is a gas that contributes to the greenhouse effect by absorbing infrared radiation. Carbon dioxide and chlorofluorocarbons are examples of greenhouse gases.

Scope 3 other indirect emissions such as supply chain activity, use of products, flights, etc.

Stands for Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation. It was designed to incentivise reductions in the causes and impacts of climate change from forested lands and facilitate low-carbon pathways towards sustainable development and recognises the need to pay for such efforts implicitly ascribing a value for carbon captured and stored in standing forests.

Insetting represents the actions taken by an organization to fight climate change within its own value chain and sphere of influence, in a manner which generates multiple positive sustainable impacts.

Areas peripheral to a specific protected area, where restrictions on resource use and special development measures are undertaken in order to enhance the conservation value of the protected area.

A carbon budget can be determined as a tolerable quantity of greenhouse gas emissions that can be emitted in total over a specified time. The budget needs to be in line with what is scientifically required to keep global warming and thus climate change “tolerable” – 2 degrees of warming.

A carbon price is a cost applied to carbon pollution to encourage polluters to reduce the amount of greenhouse gas they emit into the atmosphere.

Cradle-to-cradle is a design concept that accounts for the entire life cycle of a product and works to reuse or recycle materials. The Cradle to Cradle Certified™ Product Standard looks at a product through five quality categories – material health, material reutilization, renewable energy and carbon management, water stewardship, and social fairness.

A power purchase agreement is a contract between two parties, one which generates electricity (the seller) and one which is looking to purchase electricity (the buyer).

An ECO-PPA takes this same concept to finance ecological projects that reduce carbon through the purchase of selling carbon credits. See Business Solutions.

A certificate created to form a new method for economic trade, which takes an ethical standpoint that considers the producers first. It contributes to sustainable development by offering better trading conditions to, and securing the rights of, marginalized producers and workers.

High Conservation Values (HCV) are biological, ecological, social or cultural values which are outstandingly significant or critically important at the national, regional or global level.

Key performance indicator often used to measure performance.

A smallholder is someone who has a smallholding, this is a piece of land that is used for farming and is smaller than a normal farm.

Involves purchases that are made voluntarily by the buyer. Voluntary carbon markets function outside of the compliance market. They enable businesses, governments, NGOs, and individuals to offset their emissions by purchasing carbon offsets.

A blockchain is a digitized, decentralized, public ledger of all cryptocurrency transactions. Constantly growing as ‘completed’ blocks (the most recent transactions) are recorded and added to it in chronological order, it allows market participants to keep track of digital currency transactions without central recordkeeping. Each node (a computer connected to the network) gets a copy of the blockchain, which is downloaded automatically.

Represents one tonne of carbon dioxide, or equivalent for other greenhouse gases, which is absorbed or avoided from being emitted to the atmosphere by an emissions reduction project.

Climate finance refers to local, national or transnational financing, which may be drawn from public, private and alternative sources of financing. Climate finance is critical to addressing climate change because large-scale investments are required to significantly reduce emissions. For example, the protection of forests can be financed through the purchase of carbon credits.

The Climate Community and Biodiversity Alliance (CCBA) aims to stimulate and promote land management activities that credibly mitigate global climate change, improve the well-being and reduce the poverty of local communities, and conserve biodiversity. Their standard is used to demonstrate net positive benefits for the climate, for local communities and for biodiversity. See external standards.

Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) performance is a way to evaluate corporate behaviour and impacts on environmental, social and governance issues. See ESG.

The equivalent to one billion tonnes of carbon.

Actions to limit the magnitude or rate of long-time climate change, generally involves reductions in human (anthropogenic) emissions of greenhouse gas emissions.

Sectors that use the land such as agriculture and forestry. The land use sector is one of the major contributors to global greenhouse gas emissions.

Scope 1 refers to direct emissions.

A target to limit warming to no more than 2 degrees. The IPCC released this target at COP22, Paris. They quantified the global “carbon budget,” which is the amount of carbon dioxide emissions we can emit while still having a likely chance of limiting global temperature rise to 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels.