Accounting for the Future

Shanti Mathias (she/her)

Andrew Wilks is explaining to me that most attempts to make a difference become bureaucracy. Wilks, director of sustainability at Victoria University of Wellington, is responsible for tracking the University’s carbon emissions and offsetting them, and is walking me through the process of accounting he does to verify this.

The University wants to be carbon neutral by 2030. This means that the amount of fossil fuels used by University operations—flights, heating, commuting to campus—will be approximately equal to the amount of carbon absorbed by trees that the University plants, or accredited carbon offsets that the University buys from carbon retailers, as part of New Zealand’s Emissions Trading Scheme. It’s a simple subtraction: tonnes of carbon burned equals tonnes of carbon absorbed.

“In the short to medium term, it is not viable to transform our campus infrastructure, our business practices, and wider social norms to the extent necessary to eliminate carbon”, reads the University’s zero carbon plan. Offsetting allows the University to keep burning carbon, buying time until the systems the University relies on are free of fossil fuels. Wilks says that a net-zero carbon campus won’t look all that different. Making the University carbon neutral is mostly boring, behind the scenes stuff. No more gas heating, all renewable electricity, all flights and travel offset by carbon credits.

The University is not alone in its goal to be carbon neutral. Companies like Xero and Google are already carbon neutral; New Zealand’s entire public service has pledged to be carbon neutral by 2025, and the Zero Carbon Act commits New Zealand to being neutral by 2050. Net carbon neutrality allows organisations to be aware of their emissions and think intentionally about offsetting them; it also promotes the image of that organisation as environmentally conscious.

The actual process of achieving net carbon neutrality is administrative, usually involving an avalanche of acronyms and systematically tracking different sources of emissions. The University currently does carbon accounting through a range of national and international standards and protocols. It is signed up to the Greenhouse Gas Protocol (GGP), an international standard for organisations voluntarily tracking their emissions. More details come through local standards—MPI and MBIE publish indexes that allow the University to calculate, for instance, how much of the electricity consumed in a year is non- renewable. Carbon credits are bought and sold via the Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS), where carbon is traded in chunks of New Zealand Units (NZU). At the carbon sequestering end, where the University calculates how much carbon their offsetting absorbs, the guesswork continues. “It’s pretty blunt,” Wilkes tells me.

The University has several methods of offsetting the calculated emissions. There are “off the shelf” carbon credits, paid through a 5% levy on University air travel and bought through accredited third- party projects. The University purchased 987 tonnes of these carbon offsets for flights in 2020. As the administration and accounting are done by the carbon credit retailers, buying these offsets is relatively simple and inexpensive. VUW also offsets with a piece of land in the outer green belt around the city which is being planted with native trees. There are plans to purchase another area of forest for offsetting by 2030. As small offsetting projects, the carbon absorbed by these trees is again approximated by the number of trees, the area that the trees grow in, and the tree species. As the trees get bigger and older, they will absorb more carbon, but the calculation does not include the planted trees which might not survive.

The limits of the system do not mean that the carbon accounting is futile. Planting trees and being aware of (approximately) how much carbon an institution is burning is not a bad thing. Wilks says that the university running its own offset projects is more expensive than simply buying credits from a retailer, although it creates value in other ways. The cost is a reminder to institutions to factor in the environmental cost of all their activities. With the help of the pandemic and efficiency measures, the university’s emissions are down 40% from 2019.

“I can’t tell you the maths of [offsetting], it’s more that it seems like the right thing to do—it’s doing something,” Murray Shearer says. Shearer coordinates the ARO Project, an offsetting organisation formed as part of Praxis, a NZQA-approved programme that trains youth workers. Youth work didn’t mean much, the organisation thought, if it wasn’t contributing actively to a future for the young people they work with.

The logic of cost, rather than carbon, informs the ARO Project. Reasoning that “a budget is a moral document,” Shearer aims to have a flexible offset system that small organisations can use. Instead of calculating exact carbon emissions, which is complicated and labour intensive for groups with few resources, the project invites participants to budget for the climate, setting aside a small percentage of their operating costs as a koha that will be funnelled into environmental projects.

“It’s not about people feeling guilty for what they’re doing, it’s a recognition that just running the operation has an environmental impact,” Shearer says. ARO’s environmental projects aim for holistic environmental action: not just absorbing carbon, but developing community resiliency. “We can’t offset our way out of this crisis. We need to do radical things that change how we live,” Shearer says.

The logic of net neutrality is that ancient, fossil carbon which would rarely be released as carbon dioxide without human intervention, is the same as carbon in trees, which exist on a much shorter timescale. A brief diversion here to explain the carbon cycle: carbon is an element essential for life, which all living things on the planet use as a source of energy. Most of the carbon on earth is in solid, unavailable forms, mostly rocks such as limestone. Only 0.0004% of this stored carbon is fossil fuels. The rest of earth’s carbon is in the ocean, air, and living things. In the process of being alive, trees and other plants absorb carbon and release oxygen.

By burning fossil fuels, humans release carbon dioxide at a faster rate than plants and the ocean can absorb. The carbon dioxide acts as insulation, trapping heat in the atmosphere and causing temperatures on the planet to increase.

The carbon cycle operates at a number of different time scales, from the ‘live fast die young’ strategy of microorganisms, to the millennia of geologic time that fossilizes ancient trees and turns them into coal or petrol. When humans burn coal, petrol, or natural gas to heat our houses, make our steel, or transport our goods around the world, we change its timescale. Instead of being underground and unavailable, it is absorbed by a tree or other organism. These organisms will die, making the carbon available again. According to the Environmental Defense Fund, this won’t be enough. To avert the worst warming, humans will have to find non-tree ways to remove at least 5 gigatonnes of carbon from the atmosphere a year by the middle of the century.

In his work, Wilks is used to thinking about these complicated trade-offs and time scales. “We’ve got to be stopping the dependence on fossil fuels, but to buy us time the forestry piece has a role to play.”

To Shearer, offsetting is part of his organisation’s goal to teach young people to think of themselves as part of a whole. He says “raising consciousness” is the goal of his offset work, and must start with individuals. “Corporate structures are set up to deliver goods and products and services to us only exist because we’re asking for them, if we all looked at our own consumption patterns and lifestyle choices, it [can] change.”

Yet we live small lives, and the climate-positive actions that individuals can take have tiny, even negligible effects. Individual choices are shaped by the system that we live in, a system it is impossible to leave.

“I fundamentally reject the individual framing of climate change”, says Sophie Dixon, VUWSA’s Sustainability Officer. She is not particularly interested in carbon accounting and offset, although, as VUWSA is largely integrated with the University systems, it is also on track to be a carbon neutral organisation.

Sophie’s work is a mix of “visible” actions—such as trying to make the University single-use cup free for the month of September, and make all of VUWSA’s events zero waste—and “behind the scenes” action— writing submissions to local and national government, sitting on boards, and organising the Sustainability Committee, a network of sustainability-related student groups from across the University. She fully supports the University’s behind the scenes efforts to reduce its carbon footprint. “Anything the University does better is better for students.” Her interest is not in changing the actions that individuals take, but in changing the systems.

“Students know it’s wrong to use a disposable coffee cup, you feel guilty, but if you need coffee and you have an assignment and the café doesn’t have enough reusable cups, that’s not your fault”, she says. “Action needs to recognise and attack structural systems rather than asking you to go zero waste yourself.” The question of if individual action is meaningful is a contentious one. Journalist Mark Kaufman has documented that BP, a fossil fuel company, came up with the concept of an individual ‘carbon footprint’ to “promote the idea that climate change is the fault of individuals”.

As activist Rebecca Solnit writes, this makes climate action a matter of personal virtue, rather than collective responsibility. In fact, she says, climate-positive individual choices are enabled by regulation and big systems that make electricity renewable, food production more sustainable, and public transport cheap and effective.

Questions of responsibility are questions of scale: who is responsible for the choices you are able to make? What changes to your lifestyle are you willing to accept— no overnight courier because everything travels by train, fewer flights, less interest as your bank pulls its investments in profitable fossil fuel companies? In a time of climate crisis, these questions are crucial.

A recent IPCC report, approved by all UN member states, shows that temperatures are increasing faster than at any point in the last 10 million years, and that there is no way for the temperature increase to be kept within the 1.5 degrees specified in the 2015 Paris Accord. Against the enormity of climate change, it’s easy to feel helpless or disconnected.

Sophie points out that “people get too caught up thinking that their little action isn’t enough, but there isn’t any other way of thinking about it otherwise we’ll all be more anxious and sad.” She chooses to focus on reducing waste streams as something that is tangible, achievable, and within reach.

Models of sustainable living already exist, and they are not the systematised accreditation of carbon offsets. “It’s about indigenous sovereignty”, Sophie says. She’s prioritised Māori and Pasifika representation on the Sustainability Committee. “That indigenous perspective has a hell of a lot to teach the rest of us about how our relationship with Papatuanuku is central to our wellbeing”, Shearer says. The ARO project follows Māori leadership in the sustainability space.

“Aligning carbon framing with matauranga Māori is enriching for both sides”, Wilks says. The University’s Living Pā project aims to build an education building using indigenous knowledge, aligned to global sustainability frameworks with the Living Building Challenge.

The world is warmer than ever before, a crisis demanding immediate action everywhere, by individuals and by systems. The complexities of carbon accounting increase as the scale grows. For Wilks, accounting and offsetting the emissions of the university is an involved process, complete with difficult trade offs and systemic overhaul. Consider, then, the tangled requirements of making all of Aotearoa carbon neutral by 2050; the even more compounded carbon questions of oil states, tourist destinations, and the world whose atmosphere we all must share.