In November 2017, we announced to halt donations. During this time, the European Council, the European Parliament and the European Commission negotiated a reform of the European Emission Trading Scheme for the fourth trading period (2021-2030) within a trialogue procedure.When it became clear that the reform included a market stability reserve, which reduces the amount of issued certificates in regular intervals, the cancellation of certificates seemed almost ineffective from a climate protection perspective. We were no longer able to guarantee that a certificate withdrawn by Compensators would not have been invalidated anyway by the state at a later stage. Therefore, our crucial criterion of additionality was not warranted anymore. Hence, we decided to pause our operations until the legislative procedure was terminated and we could adapt our compensation method. Since then, three years have passed.

In the meantime, the reform of the EU ETS is done and dusted and we had the opportunity to delegate the creation and implementation of a new Compensators method to dedicated members of our association. This process took a considerable amount of time, as the entire process was exclusively based on the voluntary work of a few members. Now, we are all the more delighted to offer an efficient and transparent method for compensating emissions within Europe again!

This comes just at the right time. International agreements on climate policy can hardly account for achievements. Even though emissions within the European Union have further declined, this reduction is yet insufficient to fulfill the goals of the 2015 Paris Agreement. In order to leave a habitable planet for future generations, we need to greatly increase our efforts. More and more people push ahead of legislators by voluntarily compensating their CO2 footprint. In most cases, donations are directed towards climate protection projects which are targeted at saving emissions in countries of the global south.

We want more than that! With us, you can go beyond compensating your own footprint and also force carbon-intensive companies within Europe, a region with some of the highest per-capita emissions in the world, to reduce their air pollution. Additionally, you improve the competitiveness of green and low-emission technologies companies in Europe, by which you make an important contribution to a sustainable transition of our society. You want to know how? You can find the answer here.