Greetings Carbon Offsets Workshop Attendees, and those looking to stay engaged with us!,

Thank you so much for your participation at our workshop on Tuesday April 18th 3-4pm EST, and thank you as well to those who couldn’t attend but are looking to follow-up on the information we shared. We are grateful for the variety of perspectives represented in the meeting space, and the questions and comments we were able to address in the time we had. Moving forward, we’re looking to get your feedback on if there is a collective appetite for diving further into this topic, and what resources are still needed. 

Please feel free again to email Meredith directly with your questions and to get involved directly with our Carbon Offsets Network, C2P2 Initiative, and advisory council....

For those of you looking to gain support with your climate action and resilience work in the southeast...

Please visit this link to share your thoughts and feedback on this workshop by Friday April 28th. Please see links to resources included in the survey.

View Meredith Leigh’s presentation linked here. 

View our recorded zoom meeting video here. 

See below our Q&A of questions and comments institutions and attendees had:

Q&A with Meredith Leigh:

Sandra Van Travis, Morehouse College’s Environmental Health and Safety Officer asks:

Please send information on how to calculate offsets using trees.

Campuses have hired arborists to determine sample areas and measure trees. These measurements require tree height, diameter at breast height, and species identification. Arborists are positioned to do this work. 

If hiring an arborist is not possible, new remote sensing technology providers offer phone apps that can be used by students or faculty to calculate tree data and categorize by species. One company in particular is interested in partnering with HEIs. If you are interested in connecting with this company, email Meredith. 

Christina Kwauk Asks:

I am curious if any of the members of the working group are familiar with carbon offsets that go toward non-mitigation activities but rather to climate adaptation activities that may benefit climate resilience outcomes of environmental justice communities (i.e. instead of carbon removed, what about respiratory illnesses averted/reduced?). This may be totally out of scope for carbon offsets and this workshop, but I wanted to join to listen for these connections today. 

This is a great question and a badly needed type of offset! Right now these kinds of values are considered “co-benefits” of carbon offsets, and people don’t put a dollar value on them like they do on MTCDE reductions, but offset projects are more attractive to buyers when they list these kinds of co-benefits. Campus participation in the Offset Network is a great way to develop projects uniquely suited to your campus, especially when your goals are to serve co-benefits and you have less pressure to just produce quantifiable offsets. An example of this is Clarkson ISE’s recently avoided forest conversion project through the Offset Network. Their main goals were to create student involvement in forest inventory and carbon project development, and to protect a piece of land and the endangered species of turtle that lives on it. The offsets generated from the project are small, and will count toward Clarkson’s Scope 3 emissions, but the co-benefits were what really made the project worthwhile for them. 

Dr. Maria Boccalandro asks:

If you are in a community college setting where you work with tax payer’s money how do you justify buying these credits? I think narrative matters... are there any best practices for community colleges you can share?

A great question, and one that Second Nature is still working on as we diversify the institutions we support. I think the key to this is transparency- communicating to stakeholders both the intentions of the offset purchase and its impact. To this end, it would be advisable to make space for community input when the school develops its offsets strategy. This way taxpayers can provide feedback on whether they see value in the college purchasing offsets as a way of becoming climate neutral, and if so, what types of projects would feel valuable to them. Furthermore I think engagement in the Offset Network, where faculty and students can create local projects with high co-benefits would be a good fit for community colleges. The projects can be designed for community involvement and high community co-benefits so that the expense of engaging is co-owned and the positive impacts are felt beyond campus. 

Thank you all again, and we look forward to reviewing your feedback!,

Blythe Coleman-Mumford (she/her/hers)

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Hi Morgan, Madhu, and Elizabeth –

Given that we have been discussing offsets and Second Nature’s role, I thought you might find the slides linked below (Meredith Leigh’s presentation, highlighted) of interest. They provide an overview of the topic of offsets and several examples of what various HEIs are doing in this space.

Notably, slides 10-11 indicate that C sequestered in trees can be removed from total campus emissions as a “sink” in SIMAP. As you know, sinks are not the same as offsets because they do not require additionality. We know C sequestration for Trelease Woods and have the data to determine C sequestered by campus trees. So I think we should consider listing them as sinks. We could also consider other campus lands where land use/land cover might support C sequestration (cover cropping?).

Based on the public SIMAP report (here), we have reported 0 sinks/non-additional sequestration in the past. When will we complete the next SIMAP report?

Thanks,

Jen

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Thanks for sharing this Jen. This is helpful to have. I will look over the slides. Can you also send me the write up by Warren Lavey.

We should plan on discussing this at our next CS team meeting unless there is urgency to discuss it sooner

Best

Madhu

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Hi Madhu,

It is not urgent; we can discuss at the next CS team meeting.

The Resilience Team will be discussing the offset policy letter at today’s meeting. I will share once it is finalized. The law student working with Warren presented her findings about the MOU and paths forward at the April meeting. Notes can be found here:

https://icap.sustainability.illinois.edu/project-update/resilience-icap-team-april-meeting

Jen