Carbon and biodiversity offsets are the 'Girl Math' of the corporate world – but their consequences affect us all

By Lotta Ramrath and Bec Perse

Big businesses love to throw around green-sounding lingo like ‘carbon offsets’ to boost their perceived sustainability. But in reality, these practices are little more than creative accounting - and they’re obscuring real environmental harms. Lotta Ramrath and Bec Perse use ‘Girl Math’ to explain.

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‘Girl Math’ is internet speak for the tongue-in-cheek rules that young women use to justify unsustainable spending habits. It’s gendered, yes, but we’re mostly in on the joke.

But rather than unpack the concept itself, today we’d like to draw a parallel to something a little more sinister - green washing.

Dress up Girl Math in some corporate lingo and apply it to the environment, and you’ve got ‘offsetting’. Ironically, this practice is predominantly facilitated by men.

Offsetting, at its core, is based on a simple equation:

environmental damage + offsets = 0

The concept is all about balance. ‘Environmental damage’ represents a positive number (e.g. one square metre of land cleared or a single tonne of carbon emitted), while the ‘offsets’ represent a negative number (e.g. one square metre of land revegetated or a single tonne of carbon removed from the atmosphere). The idea is to compensate for something bad with something good.

But in reality, numbers are too neat for Earth’s complexity. In combination with Girl Math, lax laws and poor compliance, offsetting does more harm than good.

If our planet’s resources and stable climate were a bank account, we’re spending out of control. This year, we have already hit Earth Overshoot Day - it fell on the 24^th of July. It means we’re using up our annual nature budget at twice the rate it can be regenerated. Since the 1970s, the date has crept forward as global consumption grows.

Don’t get us wrong, offsets are not all bad. They enable land holders and custodians to profit from land care and climate change mitigating practices. No doubt, we need more action in this space. However, framing this action as a balance with destruction hides an insidious reality.

Commodifying our biodiversity and climate is intrinsically flawed. Our natural world’s true value is far deeper and more complex than the price tag we assign to it.

Introducing biodiversity offsetting

Biodiversity offsetting is straightforward enough in principle. Basically: if you clear some, you should protect or plant some. However, despite our best offsetting efforts, Australia is topping the leader board in terms of extinction rate.

Let’s bring this back to Girl Math.

“Under $5 doesn’t count?” Well, apparently the same goes for clearing 5 hectares, where, in WA, no clearing approval is needed for most landholders, and thus, no offsets. Every state has their own little loopholes which contribute to a net loss every year.

The main culprits though, according to research, are the following:

1. Currency

Companies around Australia are getting away with clearing valuable, rare land for degraded and less biodiverse habitats. Picture this: you write off one Rolls Royce and your offset is a handful of second-hand Mazda hatchbacks. And these Mazdas aren’t even being serviced properly. A recent government audit found 1 in 7 assessed offsets were non-compliant.

Furthermore, offsets are supposed to be protected forever, but, for the right price, and with the right urgency, the land may be cleared anyway.

2. Spatial delivery

Imagine: your local grocer gets closed, but they make it up by opening a new one in a town 300 kms away. WTF.

This happened to several threatened species of cockatoo when Perth Airport cleared some of their protected food habitat and offset it with bushland over 300 kms away. What’s worse, it was to build a shopping centre (we’re as confused as you are).

Sorry, our plants and animals don’t have cars or planes. Sometimes they can’t move at all. Offsets that far away are useless and facilitate localised extinctions.

3. Indirect offsets

We lied earlier. Offsetting doesn’t just work under the rules of ‘clear some, plant or protect some’. Companies can also use indirect offsets to support a singular threatened species - through research, for example. Ignore the fact that the rest of the cleared land is just gone without compensation. Down, down, biodiversity down!

This also means companies can ‘double-dip’ – both meeting their legally required conservation targets whilst branding themselves as a benevolent actor within the community. All the while, our collective environmental debt increases.

Hello carbon offsetting

Like biodiversity offsetting, the carbon credits system in Australia is fundamentally flawed. The key issues can be summarised into three categories:

1. Lack of Integrity

Carbon accounting is not an exact science. The system is built on estimating, rather than calculating, future carbon savings.

For example, about one third of carbon offsets in Australia are generated by planting native forests on farmland. UNSW and ANU flag serious integrity issues; one tonne of offsets is required to balance out one tonne of carbon emissions, but the system typically overestimates how much carbon is truly sequestered (removed from the atmosphere). It’s like you bought a packet of pringles, only to find out that it was 50 per cent air.

Similarly, other carbon offsets are generated from forests that weren’t going to be cleared. That is like earning carbon offsets for catching the bus to work every day, even though you never learnt to drive. No extra climate benefit, but don’t let that get in the way of a new revenue stream.

2. Missing the Point

The most fraudulent method of producing carbon offsets is ‘enhanced oil recovery’. This is where fossil fuel companies forcibly inject carbon dioxide into an almost-empty oil field to squeeze the last bit out of the metaphorical toothpaste tube. That extra oil can be sold for big bucks, and they’re rewarded with carbon offsets for sequestering carbon - a practice that immediately discounts its own climate benefit. Literally, how does this add up?

3. Greenwashing

In Australia, companies can be rubber stamped as ‘carbon neutral’ if they purchase enough carbon offsets to balance out their emissions. Reducing carbon emissions in the first place should be the key focus, but the system does not enforce this principle.

Carbon neutrality, and the reputational glamour it entails, can therefore essentially be bought. For example, Ampol offers a ‘carbon neutral’ fuel option, even though the petrol and diesel emit the same amount when burned as the normal product.

Getting to the heart of the problem.

We aren’t saving anything if we aren’t reducing our emissions and halting biodiversity loss.

It is time to interrogate whether a ‘business-friendly’ approach to environmental action is actually working. Credible research into this sector says that it is not. Our government and corporate sector are girl-mathing too close to the sun, and we’re the ones getting burnt.

Our carbon crisis needs to be met with a much stronger focus on reducing emissions than offsetting them. Methods that directly reduce emissions, such as a carbon tax or a ban on new fossil fuel projects, must be on the table.

Regarding biodiversity, legislators must pass ‘Nature Positive’ laws, which would legislate a halt and eventual reversal in biodiversity loss. Such a bill was written, then killed (cheers Roger Cook), and is being rewritten (with even fewer teeth) by the Albanese government. More radical and enduring change involves clearing less land through regenerative farming, a circular economy to reduce mining and increased urban density.

Trusting the market to fix our dual climate and biodiversity crises is proving foolhardy. By putting a price on our nature and climate and packaging them into tradable commodities, we reduce their value to just another item in your online shopping basket.

At the end of the day, Girl Math is all about indulging in a sweet treat and reassuring yourself about the decision. No one is actually claiming this is sound financial management, and companies that degrade our environment and climate know this too. They get their sweet profits, but the failing offset system means we end up footing the bill.

Every time we extract, clear, or pollute, we are losing more than resources. We are destroying the holistic world as we know it, with all its magic, culture, history, vibrancy and sanctity. Beyond that, we are degrading the foundation of our life on this planet.

There is no price tag for that.

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About the authors

Lotta Ramrath and Bec Perse

Lotta and Bec are based in Southwest West Australia’s Kwoorabup/Denmark and Boorloo/Perth, respectively. Lotta is a trained as a botanist and Bec as an engineer, with the pair both passionate about the environment, climate justice and an accelerated energy transition. They are currently travelling with their partners from Boorloo/Perth to Europe without flying. You can check out The Meandering Pod on Spotify and Instagram to follow their journey!