When I first got elected as a City Councillor 20 years ago, I found myself as deputy Cabinet Member for Sustainability. Much of this role involved representing the Council on a variety of partnership boards, one of which was Carbon Neutral Newcastle (later rebranded Carbon Neutral North East – CNNE). The model was to allow local people and businesses to offset their carbon footprint locally ie the money raised would be invested in rooftop solar, funding insulation for those in fuel poverty and planting trees in the region. It was a nice local, highly transparent scheme which had a strong public engagement element, pushing ‘measure – reduce – offset’ as the model.

After a thoroughly unpleasant experience (a director of the charity was convicted of dipping his hand in the till), we were then presented with an existential dilemma. New ‘additionality’ guidelines for offsetting suggested that the carbon removal schemes could not be located within Kyoto Protocol countries. The argument was that those Governments had pledged to cut carbon emissions, so offsetting would simply let them off the hook. Following these guidelines would remove the local angle which was the whole USP of CNNE. Our already demoralised Directors concluded that this was the final straw and decided to dissolve the charity.

The result of this was that the insulation programme lost an important funding stream, meaning fewer people in fuel poverty could be helped. Who benefits from that? How was that result in any way better to what we were doing before?

I mused on this on reading that insurance giant Aviva announced they were putting £38m into the restoration of Britain’s temperate rainforest as a form of offsetting (check out Friday’s podcast for more). Others are developing codes for decarbonising social housing (yes!) or funding regenerative agriculture through voluntary carbon credits. Obviously using voluntary carbon credits to fund national projects – where visibility is much better so integrity is easier to enforce – is very much back on the agenda.

It’s only taken about 15 years to get back to where we were.