Employees at SBTi have called for their CEO to resign over controversial plans which they fear will enable greenwashing

Staff at one of the world’s leading climate-certification organisations have called for the CEO and board members to resign after they announced plans to allow companies to meet their climate targets with carbon offsets.

They fear that companies will use the offsets for greenwashing, while avoiding making the necessary cuts in greenhouse gas emissions – without which the world faces climate catastrophe .

Seven hundred breeding cows and heifers reared in a ‘carbon neutral farming system’ sold in NSW on Thursday. But can a live cow be carbon neutral?

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Australia’s first carbon-neutral cattle sale took place this week.

Seven hundred Angus breeding cows and heifers, reared through a “carbon-neutral farming system”, went under the hammer at the saleyards in Gloucester, a small town three hours’ drive from Sydney , on Thursday.

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Operator also found by Amsterdam court to have painted ‘overly rosy picture’ of sustainable aviation fuel

The Dutch airline KLM has misled customers with vague environmental claims and painted “an overly rosy picture” of its sustainable aviation fuel, a court has found.

In a greenwashing case brought by the campaign group Fossielvrij, the district court of Amsterdam ruled on Wednesday that KLM had broken the law with misleading advertising in 15 of the 19 environmental statements it assessed. They include claims that the airline is moving towards a “more sustainable” future and statements on its website about the benefits of offsetting a flight.

Researchers found that the Victorians brought so many seeds and saplings to Britain that the trees now outnumber those in their US homeland

Three redwoods tower over Wakehurst’s Elizabethan mansion like skyscrapers. Yet at 40 metres (131ft) high, these are almost saplings – not even 150 years old and less than half the height of the Statue of Liberty.

“At the moment they’re some of the tallest trees in the UK and they are starting to poke above the forest canopy. But if they grow to their full potential, they’re going to be three times taller than most trees,” says Dr Phil Wilkes, part of the research team at Wakehurst, in West Sussex, an outpost of Kew Gardens. One or two of these California imports would be curiosities, such as the 100-metre high redwood that was stripped of its bark in 1854 and exhibited to Victorian crowds at the Crystal Palace in south-east London, until it was destroyed by fire in 1866 .

Carbon schemes are touted as a way to transfer billions in climate finance to the developing world – but people at the Kariba project in Zimbabwe say most of the profits never arrive

In the districts surrounding Lake Kariba in Zimbabwe, most people have little idea their villages were at the centre of a multimillion-dollar carbon boom. Punctuated by straw-thatched mud houses, the Miombo woodlands on the edge of the enormous artificial lake are mostly home to smallholder farmers. The gravel roads are full of potholes; cars are infrequent, as are medical facilities and internet connections. Data on the region is patchy, but Hurungwe district, that covers a number of the villages has an average poverty rate of 88%.

These communities fall within the vast, lucrative Kariba conservation project, encompassing an area almost the size of Puerto Rico. It is among the largest in a portfolio of forest offsetting schemes approved by Verra, the world’s largest certifier . Since 2011, this project alone has generated revenue of more than €100m (£85m) from selling carbon credits equivalent to Kenya’s 2022 national emissions to western companies, according to now-deleted figures published by the project developer . Proponents say these schemes are a quick way of transferring billions of dollars of climate and biodiversity finance to the developing world through company net zero pledges.

Climate committee urges government not to relax future targets after UK overachieved in 2018-22, in part thanks to lockdowns

Ministers will be able to water down the UK’s carbon reduction commitments if the government chooses to take advantage of a legal loophole.

The UK overachieved on meeting its third five-year carbon budget, which ran from 2018 to 2022, requiring reductions of 38% compared with 1990 levels. The emissions cap for the budget was 2,544 megatons of CO ₂ equivalent, but the actual emissions were 391 MtCO ₂ e fewer, or 15% below the budget.

Oil company is latest firm to act amid indications that carbon credits do nothing to mitigate global heating

Shell has become the latest large company to pull back from carbon offsets amid concerns many have no environmental impact, it has emerged, as the Carbon Trust discontinues its “carbon neutral” labelling scheme based on offsetting.

The FTSE 100 oil company, one of the leading proponents of carbon offsetting, abandoned targets to invest up to $100m a year in carbon credit schemes and purchase 120m nature offsets a year by 2030 as part of a broader watering down of its climate ambitions in June, the oil major has confirmed.

The industry has not delivered what it promised, and critics are right to be sceptical

The emerging carbon offsets market is chaotic and dysfunctional. Problems need to be addressed openly, and resolved as quickly as possible. A joint investigation by the Guardian, the German weekly Die Zeit and SourceMaterial revealed in January that the vast majority of rainforest offset credits from the leading certifier – which are sold to companies that then use them to make claims about their overall emissions – do not offer the environmental benefits that they claim. Since then, scrutiny has only increased, with more questions being asked of the western businesses behind projects such as Kariba, a huge offset-promoted forest in Zimbabwe.

Recognising the urgent need to rebuild flagging confidence, if the carbon-trading system is not to collapse as it did once before, the Integrity Council for the Voluntary Carbon Market last week announced that new rules for offset issuers will be announced in May. A separate process overseen by a different body is reviewing the claims that businesses make, based on their offset purchases. While all this might sound remote from the concerns of most people, the stakes could hardly be higher. Many environmentalists would prefer governments to oversee a transfer of resources from rich countries to the forested nations that need incentives to conserve precious carbon sinks. The reality is that due to the way our global economic system is organised, we all depend on market mechanisms.