Should IT managers jump on the offset bandwagon?

To offset or not to offset, that is the question. In the space of twelve short months carbon offsetting has rapidly emerged as one of the most complex and contentious trends in the current drive for greener business practices. Advocates argue offsetting should play a vital part in any green business strategy while critics insist the practice is both scientifically flawed and dogged by unscrupulous racketeers.

Supporters of the fast-growing offset industry argue that the practice of investing in green initiatives - such as tree planting programmes or renewable energy projects - that either remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere or stop it being emitted provides firms and individuals with a simple and accessible means of neutralising or offsetting their climate change impact.

But environmental campaigners have been highly critical of the industry arguing that the idea that you can simply pay to neutralise your emissions is based on unverifiable calculations - such as the assumption that the tree planted on your behalf lasts for its full projected life - and distracts people from the more urgent task of reducing their own emissions.

"Many offsetting schemes have dubious benefits," warns Friends of the Earth climate campaigner, Mary Taylor. "More worryingly they tend to give the impression that it's possible to 'do our bit' without taking any real measures to cut emissions."

Earlier this summer saw both sides of this argument crystallised as a Dispatches TV investigation highlighted the difficulty of ensuring offset projects deliver on their promises, while a report from the Environmental Audit Committee group of MPs insisted that offsetting could play a "useful role" in tackling climate change and argued that " encouragement and assistance must be given to individuals, organisations and c ompanies to offset".

The Dispatches documentary looked at a series of carbon offset projects, including some supported by major UK businesses such as Sky and HSBC, and uncovered a lack of scientific consensus over how best to calculate emissions from air travel and staggeringly lax project auditing processes. As a result several projects backed by offset provider the CarbonNeutral Company were found to be selling offset credits despite the project managers openly admitting that the offset investment was not essential – the projects would have delivered their emission reductions regardless of the offset provider's involvement making the offset credits themselves effectively invalid.

In contrast, the report from the Environmental Audit Committee gave the industry a ringing endorsement, arguing that while some projects were "less than robust" the concept of offsetting still had a significant role to play in helping businesses transition to low carbon business models. It also pointed to an imminent new government standard for offsetting projects, which should provide a gold standard for offset schemes that will flush out unscrupulous offset providers and establish greater confidence in the market.

It is a complex debate, and one that IT managers can no longer ignore. A raft of IT vendors, including Dell, Salesforce.com, Ricoh and VIA, have either offset their own emissions or launched offsetting services for their customers in the last year, while offset providers have targeted IT departments as potential customers.

So should vendors do their bit to tackle climate change by investing in such schemes or would doing so only distract from more important green initiatives and invite condemnation from environmentalists?

Lena Pripp Kovac, head of corporate responsibility for Europe at Dell, which recently launched its Plant a Tree For Me programme offering customers the chance to offset emissions associated with running their PC over three years, in sists offsetting schemes are beneficial as long as IT managers also make efforts to reduce their overall energy consumption.

"As an IT manager the first green priority has to be direct reduction of energy use through procuring energy efficient technology, improving power management, and changing user behaviour," she says. "Once that is done then offsetting can be a useful means of reducing your impact and can play a role in educating staff about climate change."

Chas Moloney, director of marketing at Ricoh, which runs an initiative that sees it plant a tree for every 100,000 pages a customer prints, argues that far from encouraging complacency offsetting provides an extra incentive for firms to limit their carbon emissions. "We offset the emissions from our offices and the aim is to ensure we reduce energy use and have to buy fewer offsets year-on-year," he explains.

Supporters of carbon offsetting agree that firms that do buy carbon credits have to be willing to audit the offset projects they are investing in. "We had a relationship with one offset provider that we ended after they became evasive when we said we wanted to visit the projects," says Moloney. "Now we've moved to an African tree planting programme, called Seeds to Africa, which has been far more transparent and we are currently arranging to go and look at the tree planting programmes… If you are investing in these projects you need to check they are going ahead as planned."

Pripp-Kovac adds that firms that could not afford to audit offset providers themselves should select those that use third party auditors tasked with checking that projects are well managed and pass the "additionality" tests, which prove a project is reliant on offset investment. She also recommends that firms demand information on how much of their investment goes into the offset project and what proportion is used up by administration.

Such stringent auditing may be prove a chore that drives up the cost of offsetting but Trewin Restorick, director of environmental charity Global Action Plan, insists it is essential if firms are to avoid being ripped off or even causing more harm than good. "The offsets market is an unregulated jungle and companies should ensure that the offsets they are buying are scientifically valid, are not harmful to local economies or people, are clearly additional and are independently evaluated with a transparent audit trail," he warns.

However, many environmentalists claim that despite these safeguards firms should still remain wary of investing in carbon offset schemes, and in particular tree planting programmes where even the best managed projects are unable to fully guarantee that trees will survive for the full projected life span required to offset original carbon emissions. Friends of the Earth's Taylor is typical of many environmentalists in her view that the Environmental Audit Committee is guilty of seriously overstating the benefits of offsetting.

Dr Kevin Anderson of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, goes further still and argues that offsets could actually be leading to an increase in carbon emissions and as a result it is better to do nothing than to offset. He claims that not only does the belief that you can genuinely offset your emissions remove any incentive to reduce your emissions, but that offset schemes can also inadvertently lead to an increase in emissions.

"You have to consider the economic multiplier effect of your offset investment," he explains. "If for example your investment goes on low energy bulbs for a Jamaican hotel how do you know the hotelier doesn't use the money they've saved to invest in extending the hotel or going on a flight themselves. Economic multipliers are the whole point of development, but if you are serious about offsetting your emissions over a hundred year period, as the offset schemes claim, then you need to be sure emissions won't go up as a result of your investment."

However, David Wellington, director at leading offset provider Climate Care, rejected Anderson's analysis claiming that offsetting best practices did indeed account for multiplier effects. "We refer to it as leakage - the effect the project will have on other aspects of the economy – and it is well accounted for in the Kyoto Protocol and the Clean Development Mechanism's (CDM) checks and balances for assessing a project's additionality," he said.