No official carbon standard
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This project places a wise head on young shoulders. Carbone Scol'ERE is an educational program delivered at schools free of charge that incentivises children and their families to change their consumption habits, reduce their carbon footprints, and live healthier lives.
There are no government action plans or carbon markets to encourage schoolchildren to track their carbon footprint. But teaching younger generations about climate change, what causes it, and how we can act to minimize it is crucial for the future of the planet.
In a series of 5 workshops during school hours, students ages 9-12 are given challenges to complete with their families. These include eating local and seasonal foods, taking public transport instead of the car, and starting a compost system. Pupils track their progress on a website and can see the greenhouse gas emissions they’ve avoided. These emissions are quantified, verified, and converted into “Educational Carbon Credits”.
Behavior change researchers at the Université du Québec à Trois-Rivières conducted surveys at the end of the program and again a year later, and found the greener lifestyles became long-term habits. Over 16,000 students completed the program between 2010 and 2019, resulting in the creation of almost 70,000 new eco-responsible lifestyle habits and avoiding 63,309 tons of CO2.
Everything about this project at a glance.
Our atmosphere is like a bathtub, which we have been filling for decades with greenhouse gasses. Each ton of CO2e in the tub increases the global temperature and affects the climate.
In order to prevent our bathtub from spilling - which would mean reaching a +2°C temperature increase - 3 types of actions exist:
Reduction: These projects reduce emissions, closing the tap and slowing down the filling of the tub (e.g. switching to more efficient fuels)
Avoidance: These projects preventing future emissions, stopping a new tap from being opened (e.g. protecting forests and peatlands so that they don’t start releasing CO2)
Removal: These projects remove and capture greenhouse gasses, emptying the bathtub (e.g. reforestation and direct air capture technology)
Solutions are different ways we can reduce, avoid and remove our emissions. They vary in terms of cost, level of maturity, potential to scale, and other factors. To make comparisons easier, Sweep groups solutions into categories such as Forests, Geoengineering or Buildings. Climate solutions are numerous: to learn more about what can be done, explore our catalog.
Solutions can be deployed in a large range of locations, from a micro-regions to entire sections of a continent. You might want to focus your contributions on specific areas to maximize local socioeconomic impacts or contribute where your activities are based.
Not certified • No official carbon standard
Various international and regional standards rely on established methodologies, dedicated processes and third-party verifications to guarantee that a project delivers on its promises.
Certified: Standards, such as Gold Standard or Verra, are listed for maximal transparency
Not certified yet: The process to be certified is expensive and cumbersome, and ad-hoc methodologies might not exist for specific projects, preventing them from being certified. Sweep promotes other projects after a necessary due diligence, bringing more projects to a wider audience while also offering opportunities to develop and tailor new projects according to your own needs.
Capacity is the projected volume of tCO2e reduced or removed during the crediting period. This indicates the projected net impact of a project after adjusting for potential negative impacts and other externalities. This is key to assessing the current scale of a project and can give a quick estimate of what the considered volumes represent at the project scale.
Capacity does not reflect the available quantity of credits as some of them can already be sold.
2010 - 2022
Certified projects are eligible to generate carbon credits over a certain period of time. This crediting period gives a good estimate of the progress of a project.
Older crediting periods means that projects have delivered their promises and that third-party auditors have recognized the climate impact
Crediting periods covering coming years may have already been audited for a fraction of the volumes. The rest will be generated along future audits.
SDG 4: Quality Education
Scol'ERE is made available free of charge to rural, urban, privileged and disadvantaged areas. This approach of universal dissemination of the project democratizes access to a rich and mobilizing content in environmental education
SDG 11: Sustainable Cities and Communities
School'ERE helps develop eco-citizenship through the adoption of eco-responsible behaviors, generating greater civic responsibility and more resilient living environments
SDG 12: Responsible Consumption and Production
The workshops of Scol'ERE present themes that are specifically aimed at educating people to consume and produce responsibly. These students will dictate the economic rules of tomorrow by the behaviors they acquire today
SDG 13: Climate Action
Since 2010, 16,373 students have completed the educational program and have identified more than 68,000 new eco-responsible lifestyle habits with their families, allowing the avoidance of 63,309 tons of CO2 equivalent emissions
SDG 17: Partnerships for the Goals
The program is now delivered throughout Quebec by 15 accredited training organizations and recently in France
Projects often have positive side effects beyond reducing, removing, or avoiding emissions. For example, projects might reduce waste, protect biodiversity, or support indigenous people. These co-benefits are modelled after the UN Sustainable Development Goals (UN SDGs).
Durability only applies to to removal solutions. It indicates for how long the carbon will be removed from the atmosphere - the longer this is the more desirable. For example, storing carbon as mineral underground is more durable than in a tree, making it a less risky and longer term solution.
Additionality reveals the impact of your financial support. It indicates what percentage of the global project budget is coming from contributions.
High additionality means most of the project revenue relies on contributions, and they would likely not be able to happen without this financing.
Low additionality projects are less reliant on contributions.
Other additionality criteria, such as policy or regulatory additionality, are tackled through certifications and not assessed here
The total project barrier score is available when all types of barrier are provided. It is a composite score based on the 5 barriers assessed.
The Carbone Scol'ERE educational program is self-financed to the tune of approximately 25% through the sale of Educational Carbon Credits®. The objective is to almost entirely self-finance the program in this way by reducing the contribution of grants, sponsorships and donations, while meeting the deployment targets for the coming years. The sustainability of the educational program is ensured, among other things, by major sponsoring partners on multi-year agreements and by obtaining government grants. Carbone Scol'ERE's field of expertise, through which the mechanism to generate ECCs has been built, is an educational current that has existed for decades, namely environmental education (Education for the environment and sustainable development). However, the formal education system has been slow to integrate this subject into its curricula, hence the emergence of several civil society organizations that have developed a specialization in this field. To this day, the Programme de formation de l'école québécoise (PFEQ) does not integrate the field addressed by our program and this is what makes it so strong, while at the same time representing a challenge in terms of prospecting for funding and opportunities for the program in the educational environment. Although this prospecting represents a challenge, Scol'ERE has been growing since its inception 10 years ago, having grown from 5 classes in 2010 to 338 in 2020, having reached more than 23,000 students in 1050 classes.
Barriers are the different hurdles a project might need to overcome. Barriers can give you a sense for the challenges a project faces, but also how it can add deeper value and create change. We differentiate five types of barriers: economic, social, institutional, technical and financial.
Our carbon team will help you tailor your portfolio based on your preferences.