Carbon Offsetting and Communities: Can Nature-Based Voluntary Carbon Offsetting Benefit Scottish Communities?

This briefing note captures the outputs of a workshop, involving team members and guest speakers, from the University of Strathclyde led project: Carbon Offsetting and Communities: co-developing alternative place-based voluntary offsets in Scotland. The project and workshop were co-funded by the Scottish Universities Insight Institute (SUII) and the University of Strathclyde’s Centre for Sustainable Development COP26 Legacy Fund. The all day workshop was held on 13th September 2022, to provide attendees with the opportunity to share their existing knowledge, in a bid to highlight where gaps in our understanding exist and help frame the focus of the project from the outset. We have organised these insights across the workshop’s four organising themes: 1. Fundamentals of voluntary nature-based carbon offsetting and its relevance to net-zero 2. Community impacts of voluntary nature-based carbon offsets 3. Policy challenges and solutions for voluntary nature-based carbon offsetting 4. Community nature-based carbon offsetting: next steps for research. The key outcomes from the workshop are detailed.