Annex 4: Treatment of Carbon Credits

The appropriate way to conduct decarbonization activities involves the following sequence of events: (1) conduct a thorough accounting exercise to quantify your emissions profile, (2) mitigate and reduce emissions wherever possible, (3) only once all mitigation measures and reduction activities have been explored and applied, source high-quality carbon removals or offsets for the rest of your emissions profile.

The majority of this document focuses on steps (1) & (2), as the Filecoin Green team strongly believes that Storage Providers should be able to mitigate most of their emissions through various mitigation activities. However, there may be some areas where SPs can not fully mitigate their emissions, such as the embodied emissions of hardware devices. For those operations & activities, SPs will need to source carbon removals or offsets for a small portion of their emissions profile.

We can not stress enough that carbon removals or offsets should be treated as a last-resort, only to be used after all other mitigation measures and reduction activities have been explored and applied to their fullest extent.

If Storage Providers do need to source carbon removals or offsets, they should seek to procure carbon removals or offsets that are ‘Quantifiable’, have a high-degree of ‘Durability’, ‘Additionality’, and 'Permanence’. There are a number of carbon removal and offset service providers. Below is short-list of some that the Filecoin Green team deems reputable:

1. Nori Carbon Removal

2. Regen Network Nature Carbon Tonne