Isramart : Power companies Endesa and ENEL top Euro list of carbon offsetters

Isramart news:
Campaign group Sandbag has launched an online interactive map and report showing for the first time exactly what European companies are using to comply with their carbon emissions caps and where they are getting their offsets from.

Top corporate offsetter – Spanish power company Endesa offset 25% of its emissions in 2008 and Italian power company ENEL, which part owns Endesa, got nearly all (97.7%) of its offsets from Chinese HFC chemical plant projects. Thyssenkrup’s Duisburg steelworks in Germany is the biggest single site to use offsets for 56% of total emissions in 2008. The vast majority came from chemical plant projects in India (72%).

A report based on the data also released contains recommendations for improving EU offsetting policy, including introducing tighter limits on the types and origins of projects and increasing caps on EU emissions.

Commenting on the new resource Bryony Worthington Founder and Director of Sandbag said: “Offsetting is a big part of what the EU is doing to meet its climate targets and we hope that this new resource will inform people about what is happening and help to drive changes in offsetting policy.

“By opening this information up to public scrutiny we also hope that companies using offsetting will pay more attention to the standards met by the projects they buy from.”

The new resource is a compilation of two official databases – the UN database of international offset projects and the European emissions trading registry combined with company information provided by Carbon Market Data. By linking the sources together it is possible to trace exactly what the big emitters of Europe are using as offsets to allow them to continue emitting.