GlobalGiving’s Green Scoring: Beyond Carbon Offsets

As we our all challenged by the global climate crisis it becomes more and more important to find new ways to combat its harmful effects.  As the root of the crisis is driven by human-generated greenhouse gases along with deforestation which limits the earth’s ability to sequester carbon while further contributing to emissions, it becomes important to look to greenhouse gas mitigation projects. These projects either prevent the emission of greenhouse gases or reduce the amount already in the atmosphere.  Until now the only way for donors to fund these projects have been through the carbon market where “offsets” that represent the prevented emissions or reductions are sold.  Unfortunately, there is much controversy around these markets including its inability to be completely transparent, its favoring of bigger projects, and its inability to account for non-quantifiable benefits. 

GlobalGiving’s scoring tool therefore looks to go beyond carbon offsets.  For one, our scoring tool offers an unprecedented amount of transparency to the process of funding mitigation projects.  It also ensures that the projects you contribute to are of the highest standard, whereas the offset market relies on a pass/fail system that makes little distinction between the highest-quality projects and those just passed. 

Our scoring tool also looks to bring needed finance to smaller projects that have been largely overlooked by the carbon offset market.  This market tends to favor bigger projects that can produce a large number of offset credits with a minimum amount of risk.  While this may make financial sense it leaves smaller projects—the kind that often bring valuable co-benefits (things like education and community development) to the communities in which they are situated—without vital funding.  Because these co-benefits cannot be quantified and sold like offsets, they have been left out of the equation.  GlobalGiving’s scoring tool allows you to place the kind of value on these benefits that they deserve and provide necessary backing to exemplary projects that would have been otherwise passed by.