Why purchase carbon credits?

Purchasing carbon credits is not about offsetting your emissions and should be done in parallel to initiatives to reduce your carbon footprint.

Indeed, carbon credits do not truly offset the emissions of greenhouse gases that we are producing. The emissions we generate through our lifestyle have been made and buying such credits will not remove what we emitted in the first place.

No, the role of carbon credit is to address the fundamental challenge of bringing back our concentration of greenhouse gases to what is was when our climate was in balance before the Industrial Revolution. This means that, as of today, we will need to remove at least a third of the greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, without counting for future emissions!

So we encourage you to buy and retire carbon credits as your individual social responsibility to fund great projects and support quality providers who help remove the greenhouse gases that we as a species have been emitting for a century.

The challenge for individual buyers

The world of carbon credit is hard to navigate, especially for individuals. Its access tends to be limited to businesses; even then, selecting the right types of credit is complicated, given the nature, number and various levels of maturity of the different solutions used in the market, each bringing different benefits and expected impact, for different expected duration. The price range is also massive going from a few dollars to over a thousand dollars per ton. Last but not least, finding bonafide projects that actually deliver on their promises remain a major challenge: access to third party rating agencies is limited to corporations having paid their subscriptions and these rating agencies are still in the process of building coverage of the market. The administration of carbon credit is quite cumbersome, with the need to support different registries, “retire” bought credits to ensure they are not resold, and track all this over time.

Our solution

dtrtNOW takes this complexity out: we bring curated high-quality, audited and certified carbon credits from bonafide projects that actually remove greenhouse gases, and we manage the process of buying, retiring and tracking for you.

Our service at a glance

You decide on a monthly contribution and a payment frequency. We then purchase and retire each month an amount of bonafide credits as close as possible to your net contribution after our transaction fee. Over time we build a diversified set of credits across technologies ologies and projects to ensure a broad and resilient impact.

We track what you buy and retire over time and report it to you regularly. You have access to the various official registries where your retired credits are recorded, in all transparency. We know that confidentiality matters to most of our clients. So by default, we only use your unique identifier with us when retiring the credits we bought for you. This method ensures that you can track your credits on the respective registries in all confidentiality. Of course, for clients who prefer it, we can retire credits under their name.

First, we use our proprietary framework to narrow down the types of projects we support:

• We focus on carbon credits that avoid release of existing damaging greenhouse gases in the atmosphere or remove those from the atmosphere. By doing so, we avoid the typical challenge of identifying the true impact inherent in avoidance projects .

• Then we narrow down our selection to technologies or type of projects that are structurally long-term in their effect. In carbon credit terms, these are projects with a long permanence. This ensures that we do not just "kick the can a little further down the road".

Our focus is therefore on projects that aim to destroy existing greenhouse gas before release , direct carbon capture at their source of production and promising long-term removal technologies.

We then select projects which (1) belong to a recognised standard, (2) are audited and (3) have been highly rated by an independent rating agency (we currently work with CalyxGlobal, a leading global rating agency).

Last, we do not "put all our eggs in one basket": we purchase credits from multiple types of projects from different providers and vintage (their year of production). This ensures that our clients invest in a diversified portfolio. If one project turns out to be less beneficial than initially planned, your efforts remain highly impactful. This approach is future-proofed. By doing so, we direct funding toward the technologies and providers we will need top bring down our concentration of greenhouse gas for good.