"LONDON - Staff at an influential corporate climate action group whose board announced a plan to allow companies to offset greenhouse gas emissions from their supply chain with carbon credits has now found such offsets are largely ineffective, a confidential preliminary draft reviewed by Reuters shows.

At stake is the growth of the still nascent market for voluntary carbon offsets. While they are used by some of the world's biggest companies, including Microsoft, Salesforce and Amazon.com, the size of the market remains small at around $2 billion.

The Science-based Targets initiative (SBTi), a U.N.-backed nonprofit that audits the emission reduction plans of companies, triggered a revolt among staff last month by declaring its intention to allow use of carbon credits prior to concluding its research on them.

Since then, the SBTi's board of trustees has issued a clarification to state it had not yet changed its policy and that any decisions would be "informed by the evidence"."

Virginia Furness reports for Reuters May 9, 2024. [2]