Telstra has got rid of carbon credits and claims of “carbon neutrality”, and a whistleblower says other companies should follow suit.
Last week, Telstra said it will stop using carbon credits and instead directly invest in decarbonisation projects, a move ANU professor Andrew Macintosh says is the “sensible” strategy.
Macintosh is former head of the government’s Emissions Reduction Assurance Committee. His work highlighting flaws in Australia’s carbon credit markets led to a major review of the sector.
He says companies participating in the country’s voluntary carbon markets are worried.
The Clean Energy Regulator’s March report showed that in the first three months of 2024, 1 million of the 1.2 million Australian Carbon Credit Units (ACCUs) cancelled were for compliance purposes.
Macintosh says Telstra's strategy means its emissions reductions won't "look as good on paper", but will be legitimate, leading to better outcomes for the climate and its stakeholders.
Most companies have “net zero” targets which rely on the use of offsets, even for interim targets.
Andrew Forrest’s Fortescue Metals is one of the few with a “real zero” target – in its case to stop burning fossil fuels in its Pilbara iron ore operations by 2030.
Macintosh’s work in 2022 found serious integrity problems with all of the major carbon credit markets in Australia.
The work pointed to human-induced regeneration projects that hadn’t actually regrown any forests and in some cases had seen forest cover shrink.
It also found landfill sites that were granted credits for energy systems using captured methane which would have been built anyway.
Telstra’s shift away from carbon credit markets is accompanied by a hike in scope one and two emissions reductions, from 50 per cent by 2030 to 70 per cent.
It will also cease use of the terms "carbon neutral" and "carbon offset".
The company has already reduced scope 1 and 2 emissions by 30% and scope 3 by 28%. It is set to achieve its goal of contracting renewables for all of its energy consumption by 2025.