What is the Offsets Lab?
The Offsets Lab is a container for experimentation and collaboration that directs higher education’s best assets to propel innovation and integrity in the carbon offsets space. Second Nature’s Offsets Lab supports and drives collaboration around offsets along multiple pathways, including transdisciplinary research and collective vetting, project and protocol development, peer reviewed offsets for campus climate action, as well as offset student engagement and workforce development opportunities.
Transdisciplinary Research and Collective Vetting
The Offsets Lab provides a platform for academic experts to collaborate around offsets research, and work together to assess problematic offset project types on the voluntary market according to the latest science.
Examples:
We’re partnering with academic subject matter experts to assemble working groups for protocol assessment and testing through our Improved Forest Management Focus Initiative.
We’re working with The UC Center for Climate Justice to support the development of The Climate Justice Standard for carbon offsets, which seeks to replicate and scale transdisciplinary research on offset project development in collaboration with indigenous peoples and local communities.
Learn more: IFM Focus Initiative
Learn more: The Climate Justice Standard
Project and Protocol Development
For over a decade we’ve imagined offsets differently, and provided project and protocol development pathways for higher education that make carbon offset projects more innovative, accessible, collaborative, and scalable
Examples:
We support students, faculty advisors, and campus sustainability staff in the modification of carbon offset protocols and/or carbon offset project development. This campus-as-lab approach to offsets provides teaching tools, research applications, and drives innovation around meeting campus climate goals through meaningful institutional contributions to community or on-campus mitigation.
Schools can choose from protocols that other campuses have developed and design projects according to their parameters, or modify protocols from the voluntary market to solve specific problems or innovate approaches to project design and measurement.
Past Projects: Duke University’s Lloyd Ray Farms Methane Capture
Past Protocols: Clarkson University’s Avoided Forest Conversion
Learn more: Develop a Project or Develop a Protocol
Peer Reviewed Offsets for Campus Climate Action
We’ve worked with sustainability staff, academics, and faculty to develop a system of peer verification and validation of higher education offsets that can be used as a teaching and research tool as well as a climate action tactic.
The peer review model pairs schools together to create student learning and academic research opportunities in both project implementation and project validation and verification. Schools offer third party review of each other’s offset projects, using templates and modules designed to be used throughout a semester.
Peer-Review Snapshot: Carleton College and Clarkson University- Avoided Methane through Food Recovery
Learn more: The Peer Verification Process
Student Engagement and Workforce Development Opportunities
We recognize the flaws and the benefits of market-based mitigation, and encourage higher education to get involved to make offsets a better space. Using the toughest offsets questions, we offer opportunities for educating the next generation of climate leaders.
We offer technical support for students studying offsets or developing offset projects, provide offset integrity resources and training, and connect students, faculty, and sustainability staff using offsets as the link. Students who have engaged with the Offsets Lab cite their carbon offset literacy as a main component of their employability in sustainability fields after graduation.
In collaboration with key partners, we are working to build a virtual carbon offsets course that pairs traditional market literacy with a priority on innovation, peer review, and climate justice.
Get in touch: Ask about Offsets
The Offsets Lab was born from the natural evolution of The Offset Network, a program that built the policies and processes for peer-reviewed carbon offsets projects and protocols for and by higher education institutions. Because the role of higher education in the carbon offsets market is not limited to creation or buying of offsets, the program has expanded to hold aspects of research and innovation, in addition to peer reviewed offsets and project development.
The Offsets Lab is hosted and facilitated by Second Nature.