Carbon Offsetting
January 2010 saw the launch of the second phase of the Government Carbon Offsetting Facility (GCOF II) which will enable public sector organisations to offset their CO2 emissions resulting from air travel and other essential activities.
Offsetting has a legitimate role to play in managing emissions. There are some journeys that simply cannot be avoided and offsetting mitigates the impact of CO2 emissions from those journeys by providing a mechanism through which emission reductions can be achieved elsewhere in the world.
The original Government Carbon Offsetting Fund (GCOF) was launched by Defra in November 2007 as part of the UK Sustainable Development Strategy and was designed to meet a commitment to offset ministerial and official air travel emissions in central government.
Between April 2006 and March 2009 a total of 305,000 Certified Emissions Reduction credits (CERs) were purchased by departments from a range of small scale renewable energy projects in India, China and Brazil, each with a range of impressive sustainable development benefits.
DECC is now encouraging all public sector organisations, including central and local government, devolved administrations, executive agencies and NDPB's wishing to offset their CO2 emissions to use GCOF II as their mechanism for purchasing CER credits.
The policy for GCOF is owned by DECC and its operation by Government Procurement Service, governed by a Memorandum of Understanding between our two organisations.
Emissions offset through GCOF must be for a particular activity, such as travel or the use of purchased electricity, or produced over a defined period of time, and calculated using the Defra emissions conversion factors.
Government Procurement Service worked closely with DECC to procure the second phase of GCOF -with the F now standing for Facility. It is a multiple supplier framework agreement for which 10 suppliers have been awarded contracts.
GCOF II will facilitate the purchase of Gold Standard or equivalent CER credits under the United Nations’ Clean Development Mechanism (CDM). All purchases will be quality assured under the Quality Assurance Scheme (QAS) on carbon offsetting, operated by AEA Group plc.
DECC has limited the capacity of GCOF II to offset three million tonnes of carbon dioxide between April 2009 and March 2012 – approximately one million tonnes annually. This limit has been set to encourage organisations to reduce emissions in preference to simply offsetting emissions.
For more details, users guides, useful links and publications, please see the following link.