Carbon Markets and Offsets Editing and Proofreading Services

An offset is a claim about something that did not happen. The trees would have been felled, the methane would have been vented, the cookstove would not have been bought — and because none of that occurred, a tonne of carbon dioxide can be sold to somebody else. The entire value of the instrument sits in a counterfactual that cannot be observed, which places an unusual burden on the document that describes it.

We edit what project developers, registries and carbon market participants produce — project design documents and their baseline sections, additionality assessments and barrier analyses, monitoring plans and monitoring reports, validation and verification submissions and responses, methodology applications and deviation requests, permanence and reversal risk documentation, leakage assessments, benefit-sharing and community consultation records, credit issuance and retirement documentation, corporate claims about offset use, and disclosures to buyers and auditors. Our editors work on the sections a sceptical buyer reads first.

The baseline and additionality argument is where a carbon project earns credibility or loses it, and the failure is describing a counterfactual rather than arguing for one. A document asserting that the forest would have been cleared has stated the thing that needs demonstrating. We work through these so the baseline scenario is one of several identified alternatives, with the others named and the reasons for rejecting each given, since a single unchallenged counterfactual reads as a choice made for the result; so the evidence for the baseline is dated and external where possible — prior clearance rates in the same district, the actual permit, the market price at the time — because internal projections are the weakest form of this argument and the most common; so the barrier being overcome is specific and quantified, given that "financial barriers" describes every project ever proposed; so the sensitivity of the crediting volume to the baseline assumption is shown, as a project whose output halves on a modest change should say so; so leakage and permanence are addressed with what is actually monitored rather than with a buffer percentage alone; and so the monitoring plan states what will be measured, by whom, and what happens if it is not. Documents written this way get bought by the buyers worth having.

Everything you send is treated in confidence, including project documents, methodologies and commercial information. We are editors rather than carbon market, verification or climate specialists, and we offer no view on additionality, baselines or credit integrity. What we can do is make the argument visible as an argument.