Avoidance vs. Removal Credits: Is one better than the other?

This blog is not about what is the right approach to purchasing credits. It is rather about debunking the misperception that one credit type has higher GHG integrity than the other. 

Companies make decisions about what credit to buy based on a range of considerations. Some focus on nature, while others try to support climate action near their operations. Some have decided to only purchase removal-based credits, while others buy credits that avoid emissions. 

Some companies choose to focus only on purchasing removals. The Paris Agreement sets two clear goals: (1) To avoid an increase in global average temperature to “well below 2 degrees C above pre-industrial levels” (and pursue efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5 degrees C); and (2) For the world to be climate neutral by mid-century. In order to get there, it’s clear that we need to be removing carbon from the atmosphere. We have put too much carbon into the atmosphere and, in order to achieve the 1.5 degree goal, we will need to start taking carbon out of the atmosphere and storing it – both in biogenic and geological reserves. Removing carbon is hard work. We need both natural and technological removals – and both take time and resources. There is no better time to start than now.

Others may be purchasing avoided emissions (and removals). There are also good reasons to support the avoidance of emissions. Currently the world is emitting far too many greenhouse gasses (GHGs). Every avoided emission means we have less work to do to stay below 1.5 or 2 degrees. Avoiding emissions is incredibly important at this time. The Oxford Principles for Net Zero Aligned Carbon is a useful guide for taking meaningful climate action. It provides a pathway for what the world needs over time: Stopping emissions today but, increasingly over time, supporting the removal of carbon from the atmosphere.

Both of the above are valid approaches. However, it’s not valid to focus on removals because one believes they are "higher quality." Recently, we have heard some companies suggest they are focusing on removals because of a belief that they are higher quality. This is a misperception in the market. Our data suggests that there is little difference in the quality of avoidance vs. removal-based credits, as illustrated below.

We are not sure how or why the narrative that “avoidance credits are lower quality” started. It might be due to the media focus on REDD credits and the challenges of setting REDD baselines. It is true that some project types that avoid emissions have difficult counterfactuals – REDD is, indeed, an example of this due to the fact that land use can be highly dynamic and hard to predict. 

But removal-based credits can also face challenges. For example, our ratings of afforestation/reforestation (AR) credits have a large distribution of GHG integrity. We find that many AR credits are not additional – for example, large-scale monoculture timber plantations in regions where such commercial operations are common practice. These projects get lower ratings from Calyx Global. It would be much better for the planet to purchase an A-rated avoidance credit over an E-rated removal credit.

In the coming months, we will be writing more about removal-based credits. Calyx Global has over 130 ratings for removal-based credits. These are mostly nature-based because the vast majority of credits that have been verified are nature-based. That said, we have been evaluating a number of new project types – from biochar to geological storage – and we will be generating new ratings in the coming months for these credit types as well. We find that durable carbon dioxide removal (what some call “durable CDR”) also can have a wide distribution of quality.