We are excited to share a new way to help carbon credit buyers better understand the quality of carbon projects. Subscribers can now request the environmental and social risks of a carbon project across 10 areas and 55 sub-areas that align with international best practices.

Carbon projects are designed to make a positive impact on the climate. They also have an immense potential to benefit local communities and ecosystems and promote sustainable development. However, projects must also follow a do-no-harm approach, ensuring they avoid negative social, environmental or economic impacts. Experience around the globe shows that if environmental and social safeguards are not effectively adopted, these projects have the potential to negatively affect the most vulnerable stakeholders, such as indigenous peoples, local communities, women and the most critical ecosystems.

With a lack of sufficient safeguards, risk is not only introduced to the people and places projects operate in, while also impacting buyers who purchase carbon credits from a project. Just as Calyx Global helps carbon credit buyers to understand the greenhouse gas risks of individual carbon projects, we will now do the same for environmental and social risks. By bringing clarity to this critical component of quality, we hope to help the carbon market continue its move towards high integrity carbon credits.

How we help

Calyx Global’s risk screenings are available to platform subscribers and are based on the below ten environmental and social safeguard areas. We also offer subscribers an optional deeper project analysis that dives into 55 sub-areas and incorporates interviews of local stakeholders.

Collaboration and oversight

When developing our environmental and social risk framework, we wanted to ensure we were following established best practices and tapping into leading experts. Our Environmental and Social Safeguards team collaborated with Climate Law & Policy to design a framework that aligned to international best practices. 

Daniela Rey, CLP Founder and Managing Director, said, “High-integrity climate mitigation projects are an important tool to tackle the climate crisis. To achieve high integrity, they must deliver sustained positive outcomes for affected stakeholders and the local environment. We are proud to work with Calyx Global to develop environmental and social governance assessments to ensure that this element of integrity has a solid framework for assessment.” 

Just as we have for the Calyx Global GHG and SDG frameworks, we have an oversight panel of diverse experts who ensure our environmental and social risk framework continues to follow best practices and maintain integrity.