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CSG Standard

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The CSG Standard is a voluntary carbon market certification standard, which describes the principles, processes and rules for the issuance of CSG Standard carbon credits. The CSG Standard is designed to finance small-scale climate protection projects, allowing voluntary carbon market participants to support local initiatives by purchasing carbon credits.

Contents

Voluntary carbon market certification standards

Voluntary carbon market certification standards, also known as carbon offset schemes, define the rules of verification, measurement, tracking and monitoring of greenhouse gas emission units (so-called carbon credits) generated by climate protection projects . Several such standards exist. Projects running under voluntary carbon market certification standards (e.g. Verified Carbon Standard, Gold Standard, Social Carbon, VER+, The Voluntary Offset Standard) currently in use around the world must meet three additionality criteria:

• Legal additionality: a project cannot meet this criterion if it is only realised in order to comply with legal requirements. However, it must comply with all relevant standards and legislation;

• Environmental additionality: a project may not cause large-scale negative impact on the environment;

• Financial additionality: a project may only be implemented if it could not be realised without the profits made through selling carbon credits. (http://www.wwf.org.uk/filelibrary/pdf/carbon_offset_long.pdf )

Basic principles

  • Sustainability: a project must contribute to sustainable development. This means that project owners need to demonstrate that their project has positive socio-economic impacts, and improves the lives of local people.
  • Completeness: a project should take into account all relevant changes in GHG emissions, as well as carbon sequestration. The project must comply with both domestic and international regulations in force. Project developers are required to declare that their project is fully compliant. The project must also comply with all the requirements under this standard.
  • Credibility: both the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions and carbon sequestration must be measured and verified by an independent third party during the entire crediting period.
  • Transparency: fulfilling the aims of a project as well as the progress made must be monitored continuously, i.e. recorded in regular reports, and verified by an independent third party during the entire crediting period.
  • Dialogue: project developers must listen to all parties directly interested, and take their opinions into account during the implementation of a project. Project developers must provide project-related information to the parties directly interested, and ensure they have the opportunity to give continuous feedback.
  • Local support: the CSG Standard is designed to support local projects that generate carbon credits for local people and companies. This has to be taken into account as a fundamental principle in the evaluation of each project.

    • Verification process

    Depending on the type of a particular climate protection project, a Project Design Document (PDD) is prepared either based on existing methodology or after developing new methodology, which is then submitted to the Technical Advisory Panel (TAP), consisting of external experts, for approval. The Project Design Document includes a detailed description of both the technical and business plan for a project, the methodology used, monitoring procedures and the expected environmental impacts of the project. Following the third-party verification of the project, carbon credits may be issued through carbonregistry.com, an online registration system for the administration of various carbon credit transactions. Carbon credits sold through the system will be used by buyers to offset their emissions, and at the same time credits are “retired”, i.e. withdrawn from circulation.

    References

    CSG Standard Wikipedia
    (Text) CC BY-SA