by SEATTLE – At Climate Promise Arena, the ice is made from rainwater, the Zambonis are electric and the roof is essentially recycled, dating back to an earlier version of the venue built in 1962.
From the solar panels on the parking garage to the free public transit to attend the games, the building’s operators have gone green at every turn, announcing in October that it will be the first certified area of “zero -carbon” in the world.
It’s a title some carbon experts say is hard to prove.
The 18,300-seat arena produces very few direct emissions from its operations, but to offset the greenhouse gases produced during construction, Seattle-based Amazon purchased voluntary offset carbon credits stemming from the Colombian rainforest. The market for voluntary offsets has been affected by scientific findings suggesting that many carbon projects, particularly those designed to prevent deforestation, routinely exaggerate their impact.
“Do we see limits in the legacy carbon market? The answer is there,” said Jamey Mulligan, head of carbon neutrality science and strategy at Amazon, adding that the company was using its scale to improve the deal.
In an interview, Mulligan said the company bought the credits several years ago, when the company was just starting out in the carbon market. He said that Amazon believed that this particular project used reasonably conservative estimates and was of high quality, but he also acknowledged that there was a need for greater rigor for the voluntary carbon market.
Mulligan said more “work” is needed to ensure the baseline projections are conservative and that overall nature-based carbon credit projects have sound methodologies.
“This is a market that has to succeed, and it has to scale much further than it has been operating today,” he said. “And it won’t exist without trust.”
Donna Lee, an executive at the carbon rating company Calyx Global, said her firm’s analysis suggests that the rainforest credits bought for the area likely helped prevent some deforestation. But Lee also said it was “at risk of overcrediting,” meaning the project was likely claiming more benefits than it delivered, according to Calyx’s analysis.
That the folks at Climate Pledge Arena, backed by Amazon’s deep pockets and a long bench of sustainability workers, can’t convince outside experts that their offsets are as far as their billing on paper shows how deep the crisis is the credibility of the voluntary carbon market. .
If the Climate Promise Arena is a monument to the possibilities of a green future, it is also a great example of the challenge that achieving real carbon can have.
“They’ve made some good faith efforts here, but like a lot of companies, they’re kind of caught up in this evolutionary landscape that’s considered plausible,” said Derik Broekhoff, a senior scientist at the Stockholm Environmental Institute in Seattle. , from the field operators. “It’s hard to work within a system that’s full of flaws.”
Credit crunch
Carbon credits, or offsets, are emissions transfers or reductions. Companies buy these credits, which are usually listed in non-profit registries, and use them to offset the carbon pollution associated with their business.
Companies have used voluntary offsets to market products with labels such as “carbon neutral,” to meet internal emissions targets and to support climate action projects. Critics say they can facilitate glasnoite and can limit companies’ ambitions to reduce emissions in core business practices.
Building operations account for about 27% of carbon emissions worldwide, according to Architecture 2030. Common building materials, such as cement, iron, steel and aluminum, account for an additional 15%.
Broekhoff discourages companies from relying on offsets to make marketing claims – “a lot of these credits could be hot air,” he said. Meanwhile, others, including Amazon, want to overhaul the voluntary carbon market, where prices have been depressed, and make it tougher.
Climate Commitment Arena is about as green as buildings get. The International Liveable Futures Initiative (ILFI), which assessed the field’s emissions data and deemed it a “zero-carbon” building this fall, requires operators to remove all fossil fuels, operate efficiently and use low-carbon materials in construction.
Beyond the zero carbon label requirements, the arena’s sustainability team collects invoices from food vendors, waste haulers, utilities and performers to estimate the indirect emissions of each concert and sporting event. In the first year of operations, the building was responsible for approximately 38,000 metric tons of CO2 equivalent emissions. The operators have pledged to buy offsets each year to offset all indirect emissions, meaning the carbon cost of each guest’s concert T-shirt, hamburger and Uber ride is accounted for.
Amazon money, Colombian credits
The area purchased renewable energy certificates to account for all of its power needs, and plans to be the anchor user of the local electric utility’s plan to create a new renewable energy facility.
But field construction can be so green. It emitted about 37,000 metric tons of CO2 equivalent during its construction, according to Rob Johnson, senior vice president of sustainability and transportation for the Climate Promise Arena and the Seattle Kraken, the NHL team that plays there.
ILFI allows operators to purchase carbon offsets once to offset emissions from construction. As part of its naming agreement, Amazon took the lead in getting offsets.
The company bought and redeemed carbon credits from a project in Colombia called Acapa, which is part of the non-profit program Verra, an organization that sets standards for carbon market projects. When asked, Amazon did not share the price it paid for Acapa credits.
The nearly 144,000-acre Acapa project was originally established by the United States Agency for International Development and then turned over to a series of nonprofits. The project aims to reduce logging by local households and encourage other economic projects with less environmental impact, such as coconuts, acai and cocoa, according to project documents.
Carbon credits of this type, known as REDD (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation), have come under scrutiny from academics and journalists.
Several academic studies have found that these types of credits, on the whole, provide a fraction of their claimed benefits. Guardian headline called these credits “worthless.”
In general, “the methodologies are not aligned with the science,” said Barbara Haya, director of the Berkeley Carbon Trading Project., who argued that registries are so flexible that they allow project developers to overestimate the benefits without sufficient independent audit.
Lauren Withey, who now works for the nonprofit Earthjustice, spent about two years in Colombia studying nature-based offsets like Acapa. She said it is easier to design a project that creates carbon credits on paper than it is to change the economics of how poor villages work in remote rainforests.
“Basically, it’s very difficult to change livelihood dynamics in these communities,” Withey said.
Meanwhile, some upstart carbon rating agencies offer independent modeling of carbon projects, which rely on satellite and project data.
Lee, from ratings agency Calyx Global, said her firm believed the Acapa project had achieved some emissions reductions.
“It really reduced deforestation. We can’t say that for every project,” Lee said of her company’s assessment. “However, they are giving too much credit. It’s very common.”
Penance, not absolution
The Verra registry, which has been the focus of scrutiny, revised its methodology on Monday in an effort to provide better quality control. The nonprofit will now set project baselines instead of project designers and use remote sensing technologies to ensure emissions reductions.
“It will start to bring more reliable results to REDD and improve trust and confidence,” Toby Janson-Smith, Verra’s chief program development and innovation officer, said at a news conference.
Johnson, of the Climate Pledge Arena, said his team relied on Amazon’s carbon market expertise for offset purchases.
Amazon is now the largest buyer of renewable energy in the world, Mulligan said. It is also the world’s largest buyer of direct air capture credits. The company co-founded the Leaf Coalition, which is funding large-scale tropical forest protection and wants to set a stricter standard for offsets and transparency.
Asked if he felt it was fair to call the field a zero-carbon building, given the uncertainty surrounding REDD projects, Mulligan said: “That’s an interesting philosophical question that we’re unlikely to weigh in on, ” adding that the situation and Amazon had “done hard work to decarbonize the actual facility and its operations and its value chain” before buying the offsets.
Haya agreed that the initial work to make the building as efficient as possible and to create new sources of renewable energy was vital.
“The most important thing is to reduce their own direct emissions and that’s how they should be considered primarily,” said Haya.
People think that the voluntary carbon market has lost so much credibility that it is time to stop marketing products as “carbon zero” or “net zero” when it comes to carbon credits.
“There’s a risk of expressing that you’re somewhere equal to zero,” Broekhoff said. “See these carbon credits as penance, not redemption.”
This article was originally published on NBCNews.com
