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Climate change challenges our current way of life. It is a risk multiplier whose cascading effects shape economic and social life in various ways and at multiple scales from daily routines to global governance. As a result, a myriad of responses have been developed. From an economic point of view, climate change appears as “the world’s greatest market failure” (Stern, 2007) that has been responded to by creating novel markets and market mechanisms. The voluntary carbon markets, where individuals and companies can purchase carbon credits to offset their emissions, are an example of creating market responses to climate change. Voluntary carbon markets offer a site for companies, organizations and individuals to demonstrate their will of going beyond the slowly developing regulations to compensate for their greenhouse gas emissions at a more rapid pace. At the same time, the role of the voluntary carbon markets in a post-Paris climate agreement era appears unclear.

The voluntary carbon markets is one recent way to address this gap. As the role of voluntary offsetting in nations’ and companies’ carbon neutrality promises remains unclear, voluntary carbon markets offer a site for companies, organizations and individuals to demonstrate their will of going beyond the slowly developing regulations to compensate for their greenhouse gas emissions at a more rapid pace.

The swift creation of user-friendly voluntary offsetting practices has overshadowed the multifarious societal underpinnings and everyday ramifications of these procedures and the marketization of climate change in doing so. The key questions to voluntary market practices have remained thus largely unasked: Who is responsible for additional climate action and how do we hold different actors to account? How do we measure, value and regulate carbon offsets from distinct sites? How do consumers make sense of and engage with voluntary carbon offsetting? By addressing these questions, the Climakedo project aims to undo the makings and moralities of current offset products and projects.

Our research focuses on voluntary carbon offsetting through a multi-sited lens: we target companies providing compensation services, consumers purchasing carbon offsets  and the projects through which the concrete compensation work eventually takes place. At the same time, by focusing on the mediations between these three sites, we trace knowledge practices and modes of justification that become both manifested and domesticated in each of the sites and shape these sites in so doing.

In the Climakedo project, Kamilla Karhunmaa examines the politics and knowledge practices behind voluntary carbon offsets in the Global North. As an increasing number of companies have made declarations of “carbon neutrality”, the demand for voluntary offsets has increased and projects have emerged in novel contexts, such as in Finland. Kamilla analyzes the development of voluntary carbon offsetting and its regulation in Finland and the EU, asking: how is voluntary carbon offsetting perceived as a form of climate action and what types of action does it produce amongst offset producers, policymakers and consumers? This part of the project focuses on how  actors deal with the tensions inherent in voluntary carbon offsetting.