On Sunday, January 9, Vermont Green FC held its first-ever tryout. 67 trialists braved the frosty temperatures and brought the heat to Virtue Field. It was a good omen of things to come given the high level of player interest, commitment, and talent. Although only a handful of trialists will be selected to help us on the pitch this season, on the day, everyone helped us advance climate justice. We want to thank all trialists who came out to pursue their passion for the beautiful game.

The winter tryout brought us talented and passionate players. It also produced environmental stewardship and climate justice. This is how we do it at Vermont Green – every decision we make, in this case to host an open tryout, is considered through the lens of environmental justice. It has been our intention from the beginning to build a club that is a force for good, a club that benefits all people and the planet. Here’s what that looked like at the tryout:

  • Informed trialists in advance that their involvement contributed to climate justice through the verified carbon credits we would purchase to neutralize their travel emissions.
  • Encouraged players to think more sustainably about their travel options and helped coordinate carpools and public transportation routes for players who were interested. 
  • Designed a sustainably sourced tryout tee with the message, “climate justice is social justice.” Not only did they wear the message during the tryout, but took the shirt home with them, spreading the message among their networks and in the community.
  • Selected a tryout tee with environmental and social responsibility attributes that reduce carbon emissions and plastic pollution, paid a fair wage to workers, and can be kept out of a landfill by returning the shirt at the end of its useful life to the vendor. The vendor will upcycle the shirt fabric into a new shirt. Don’t be in the one garbage truck every second club. Join the circular club. 🙂  
  • Provided trialists with soccer balls made from recycled plastic bottles.
  • Calculated total travel carbon footprint using GHG Protocol guidance and tools, ensuring the highest standard of carbon emissions accounting.
  • Promoted a financial accessibility policy through our public communications and directly with trialists. If paying the registration fee was a financial hardship, we removed that barrier to participation.

What’s The Big Deal?

Each tonne of carbon we emit is a withdrawal from our remaining global carbon bank account in the sky. Let’s assume you budget for things like food, gas, rent, mortgage payments, etc. You understand that spending more than what you’ve budgeted for can lead to hardship in the future. For example, missing a mortgage payment could mean incurring a penalty fee, taking a hit on your credit score that negatively impacts your chances of being approved as a borrower in the future, and if you continue to miss payments, the bank may foreclose on your home. The consequences of exceeding your budget can turn into a vicious spiral, adding more expenses, limiting your ability to take care of yourself and your family, and creating barriers to your future financial stability. This is exactly what too many of us have been doing when it comes to our climate. We’ve been overspending our carbon budget in lavish proportions, in part because many of us didn’t realize we had a carbon budget to begin with. But our Earth has been paying attention. It’s been sending us notices in the form of severe heat, drought, wildfires, floods, tropical storms, and hurricanes, reminding us we’re late on our payments.

 

The implications are not good. The scientific consensus tells us we’re heading rapidly toward foreclosure on our planetary home, and bankruptcy isn’t an option. Climate-induced hardships take a serious toll on the health and wellbeing of every human and animal on the planet. Some of us have been insulated from the effects of climate change due in large part to luck and privilege. However, whether we’ve known it or not, others are paying our late fees. Climate change forced around 30 million people out of their homes in 2020 due to weather and climate hazards. If we continue spending our carbon in this way, we could force 1 billion of our fellow humans out of their homes due to climate impacts by 2050. Moreover, it’s not just us. Animals and plants are going extinct at levels not seen in all of human history – one million species are at risk of extinction, many within the next decade. Climate change is a significant driver and accelerator of this. Nearly 3 billion animals were killed or displaced by Australia’s devastating bushfire season of 2019 and 2020. But unlike our personal bank account, we share our atmospheric carbon account with our family, friends, neighbors, and every other living thing on this planet. We’re all in this together and our individual carbon spending behavior has a direct effect on the well-being of everyone else. Imagine if you shared a bank account with others in your family and community. It wouldn’t take very long before the community took action to set straight anyone who was hurting the collective financial health and stability.

How’s The Carbon Bank Account Looking These Days?

We have around 360 billion tonnes of CO2 emissions left in the account according to the IPCC’s most recent AR6 report. If we can keep our carbon pollution below this amount indefinitely, we’ll give ourselves a 66% chance of keeping global warming under 1.5°C. Warming beyond 1.5°C ensures we’re going to experience the worst-case scenarios climate scientists have been warning us about. That is what’s left of our carbon budget for all humans living now and who will be born into this world in the future. So where does that leave us in our budget planning? Global CO2 emissions have been trending around 36 billion tonnes per year in recent years (despite a dip during the Pandemic), so the scientific consensus tells us we have until around 2030 under current emissions trends before we exceed our budget and lock our planet into 1.5°C of warming. Our global population is on track to reach 8 billion people as early as 2023. If every person on Earth were to share equally in the effort to stay within our global carbon budget, each of us would need to emit an average of just 2.3 tonnes of CO2 per year by 2030 to stay within the 1.5°C guardrail. This is roughly half the average footprint of every person on Earth today and about 1/7 of the average American’s footprint, which is around 16 tonnes. Remember though, this 2.3 tonnes is not representative of what we might call a fair share. It is useful as a benchmark to compare with our personal carbon footprint and can help us start the process of figuring out how we can reduce our footprint to align with this 2030 target. But it leaves out the fact that climate change has been caused by the historic emissions of developed countries and transnational corporations.

 

Let’s take Nigeria, for example. It is the largest economy and population of any African country and considering its oil industry, one might assume it’s probably contributed quite a lot to historic carbon emissions. Yet the entire African continent is only responsible for 3% of all historic emissions. Meanwhile, the U.S. has contributed 25%. Moreover, in just 2.3 days, the average American emits as much carbon pollution as the average Nigerian does in one year. Sadly, it’s countries like Nigeria and its people that have not only contributed the least to climate change but suffer the worst impacts of a changing climate. We’re already seeing the signs of food insecurity, conflicts over resources, more frequent and severe natural disasters, and climate refugee migrations. Remember when you learned that by 2050 1.2 billion people could be displaced by climate change? This is one significant reason why climate scientists are urging all of us to commit to moving our entire world to net-zero carbon emissions by 2050. We are currently on course for human migration–and the inevitable tension, conflict, and suffering that comes with–that has no precedent in human history. The U.S. Pentagon has put it in other terms: climate change is a “threat multiplier,” increasing the dangers of a range of issues, from infectious disease to terrorism. So, how does the world get to net-zero and avoid overwhelming our institutions and communities with such threats? We have to prioritize solutions that contribute to climate justice.

The Results Are In

As we described earlier, we accomplished quite a bit at the tryout. We made progress on the sporting side of our club and our mission. So what are we most excited about? Here are our top three:

  • Trialists organized 22 carpools, which resulted in over half of all trialists choosing a smarter and more sustainable travel option, reducing the overall carbon footprint of the tryout, and keeping unnecessary emissions out of our atmosphere.
  • The overall travel carbon footprint amounted to less than 3 tonnes of carbon emissions according to GHG Protocol-derived carbon accounting. 
  • We purchased verified carbon credits for 3 tonnes of emissions from a Gold Standard verified project that advances climate justice.

 

What Is A Climate Justice Project?

After extensive research, we’ve identified the central theme of climate justice: equity. And equity is foremost a matter of justice, equality, and human rights. “Equity also fosters effectiveness and efficiency. Given a common goal – a livable planet – it ensures that resources, including financial and technical ones, go where they are needed most, not just where they are most likely to produce profits. Efficiency comes from making the most appropriate choices now for the world as a whole, rather than delaying them until the consequences are more severe, expensive, and difficult to fix.” A climate justice project, therefore, looks like equity in action. And equity can look like a lot of things, as the Bali Principles of Climate Justice make clear. The most important thing in the selection process is to view a project through the lens of equity. To help ourselves in this process, we compiled a non-exhaustive, working list of key criteria that we prioritize when purchasing carbon credits. Here’s the list:

Climate justice project criteria:

  • Verifiably reduces greenhouse gas emissions. 
  • Developed in collaboration with the local community. 
  • The local community controls some or all aspects of project development and management.
  • Supports local economic development and entrepreneurship.
  • If financial assistance is provided, it is appropriately structured to local socio-economic conditions and is non-predatory.
  • Reduces living expenses for project participants in the local community.
  • Provides clean, renewable, locally controlled, and low-impact energy resources.
  • Affords all people, including the poor, women, rural and indigenous peoples, the right to accessible, affordable, and sustainable energy.
  • Affords communities dependent on natural resources for their livelihood and cultures the right to own and manage those resources in a sustainable manner.
  • Opposes the commodification of nature and its resources.
  • Provides opportunities to improve health outcomes in the local community. 
  • Reduces demand for fossil fuels.

We discovered several projects in the Gold Standard registry that deliver on some of these criteria. The project that excited us the most is the Cambodia National Biodigester Program. The first thing that caught our eye was the economic shared value produced by a biogas project. 

 

Gold Standard Biogas Shared Value

Gold Standard Biogas Shared Value

Gold Standard developed a methodology that shows the shared economic value of a project beyond reducing greenhouse gasses in our atmosphere. Improved cooking solutions can have a positive impact on a wide range of environmental and social outcomes. In the case of biogas, investing our dollars in one carbon credit, equivalent to one tonne of CO2 emissions, returns $465 of shared economic value across several United Nations sustainable development priorities: climate action, decent work and economic development, poverty alleviation, good health and wellbeing, reducing demand for firewood and other fossil fuels, and reducing negative impacts to terrestrial ecosystems and biodiversity. 

 

Real-World Impact

There’s a lot packed into Cambodia’s biogas program. Here is the bird’s eye view:

  • Domestic biodigesters provide a way for individual households with livestock to reduce their dependence on polluting firewood and expensive fossil fuels for cooking and lighting. The project also provides additional benefits with the bio-slurry providing a great means for fertilizing and improving local agricultural production.
  • The fixed dome digester has a lifespan of over 20 years and is part of a national program run by the Cambodian Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries (MAFF) and SNV Netherlands Development Organization who oversees project development, monitoring, and reporting. 
  • From the program’s inception in March 2006 to December 2019, nearly 28,000 biodigesters were constructed through 118 micro-enterprises in 15 provinces, spurring local economic development and entrepreneurship.
  • The program provides loans for households made available through three nationally operating micro-finance institutions.  Since 2010, over 70% of households have used a biogas loan to finance their biodigester. Loans are generally paid back within two years.
  • The Program works with a market-based model and has the intention to develop the sector in such a way that it can run without the direct involvement of the Program. The private sector development arm of NBP is therefore establishing independent enterprises in rural areas and building the capacity of those enterprises on marketing and promotion, internal quality control, and after-sales services.

Project Impacts and Benefits

There’s a lot to like about this program. Here’s a ground-level view of the positive impacts of the project:

Livelihood and health improvement:

  • 27,980 biodigesters constructed from March 2006 to December 2019 / 78,853 direct beneficiaries
  • 64.4% of constructed biodigesters still operational; i.e. 18,020 smoke-free kitchens (December 2019)
  • Biogas kitchen air pollution was reduced by 88% (Particulate Matter 2.5).
  • $143 USD saving in expenditures on cooking fuels per household per year

Employment creation:

  • 118 private enterprises established of which 53 are active
  • 810 trained masons
  • 154 trained supervisors

Environmental benefits:

    • On average 3.52 tCO2 reduced per digester in 2019
    • 821,440 tCO2 reduced between May 2009 and December 2019
    • 276,300 tonnes of wood saved

Climate Justice 

Based on the criteria described, the project achieved a number of climate justice goals: 

  • Put the solution in the hands of the local community while providing technical support to encourage local entrepreneurship and economic development.
  • Provided financial assistance that is appropriately structured to local community socio-economics and is non-predatory.
  • Reduced household costs through a climate action solution.
  • Provided clean, renewable, locally controlled, and low-impact energy resources.
  • Afforded the right of all people, including the poor, women, rural and indigenous peoples, to have access to affordable and sustainable energy.
  • Afforded the rights of communities dependent on natural resources for their livelihood and cultures to own and manage the same in a sustainable manner.
  • Provided economic development opportunities for local communities through climate action solutions.
  • Provided opportunities for better health outcomes through reduced indoor air pollution.
  • Encouraged local resource conservation by reducing demand for wood and fossil fuels for cooking.
  • Reduced demand for and reliance upon fossil fuels.

The Big Picture

Just by showing up, trialists contributed to positive environmental and social outcomes for all of us, but especially those who suffer the greatest burdens of climate change. Our club pledges to continue making this kind of positive impact. We fulfill this pledge by making climate justice the default option for our players, staff, and supporters. We hope you’ll join us in making environmental justice the default choice in sports, our communities, and each of our lives.  

[1] ​​https://www.carbonindependent.org/54.html

[2] ​​https://www.carbonindependent.org/54.html

[3] ​​https://www.carbonbrief.org/global-co2-emissions-have-been-flat-for-a-decade-new-data-reveals

[4] https://www.oxfam.org/en/press-releases/carbon-emissions-richest-1-set-be-30-times-15degc-limit-2030

[5] https://climatepositions.com/ipcc-report-limiting-global-warming-to-1-5oc-requires-45-co2-reductions-by-2030-compared-to-2010-and-zero-emissions-by-2050-but-which-countries-are-to-reduce-how-much/

[6] https://www.nature.org/en-us/get-involved/how-to-help/carbon-footprint-calculator/#:~:text=The%20average%20carbon%20footprint%20for,under%202%20tons%20by%202050

[7] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ipVxxxqwBQw

[8] https://www.un.org/press/en/2019/gaef3516.doc.htm

[9] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-58080083