Mitigating environmental and social risks in Volkswagen ClimatePartner’s investments

Volkswagen ClimatePartner finances impactful, high-quality climate projects that address the global challenge of climate change so Volkswagen Group can use them toward its corporate climate goals.

The challenge

Volkswagen ClimatePartner ensures the carbon projects developed for Volkswagen Group, amongst others, meet corporate sustainability and climate goals. In its pursuit of quality, the organization engages in the very early stages of a project. Its due diligence includes assessments of project developers' reputations and project details, and it also influences project design to ensure compliance and that any risks are addressed upfront.

Ensuring environmental and social risk (ESR) is accounted for within any carbon project is important. The team at Volkswagen ClimatePartner conducts extensive due diligence on compliance, looking at asset owners and their interests, hiring local lawyers and engaging local governments. As part of their expanding ESR due diligence process, they needed to develop a framework to ensure a consistent and reliable process for identifying risks. They also needed to do more analysis than their team size allowed. This required engaging experts in carbon project safeguards.

How Calyx Global helped

Volkswagen ClimatePartner is a smaller team and already relies on Calyx Global to augment its due diligence with greenhouse gas and Sustainable Development Goal ratings. Our ESR assessments presented an additional avenue to help inform their burgeoning due diligence safeguard framework. The team was already working with outside safeguard experts but turned to Calyx Global as an additional layer of assessment to ensure there was nothing they missed and to maximize the efficiency of their already stretched team. 

The results

By tapping into Calyx Global’s ESR assessments, Volkswagen ClimatePartner was able to inform their own due diligence processes while increasing the number of projects they could evaluate. In turn, they decreased their exposure to environmental and social risks within the projects they pursued. “The assessments gave us a perspective of the communal relations, things happening on the ground that we wouldn’t have otherwise seen,” said Jacob Bourgeois of Volkswagen ClimatePartner.

High-quality carbon credits mean environmental and social risks are accounted for with effective and robust safeguards. We were thrilled to support Volkswagen ClimatePartner’s pursuit of upholding this principle. At Calyx Global, we pride ourselves in being able to help teams looking to make a greater impact than their makeup allows. As shared by Jacob, “Calyx Global’s environmental and social risk analysis is great for our small but diligent team. It gives us everything we need.” Volkswagen ClimatePartner will continue to leverage Calyx Global's expertise to additionally support the ongoing integrity and impact of their carbon credit projects.