Charter Workstreams
Meaningful offsetting
This workstream explores innovative ways to collaborate and maximise firms’ carbon credit budgets, creating projects with high social outcomes, which also provide vital climate mitigation and adaptation.
Firms involved in this workstream are: Freshfields (chair), Charles Russell Speechlys, Clyde & Co, DLA Piper International, Simmons & Simmons, Slaughter and May and Winston Taylor (formerly Taylor Wessing).
Workstream highlight:
Groundbreaking Partnership with Save the Children Global Ventures
Charter firms and Save the Children Global Ventures have developed a new approach to offsetting through a major, long-term sustainable development impact project in Nandi, western Kenya, which is underpinned by a triple bottom line of social-environmental-economic resilience.
The ‘Nature-based Solutions for Children’ project represents a new strategic direction for the NGO in terms of rethinking philanthropy in the Global South. The new model gives agency and sustainable revenue streams to the local community through nature-based solutions, while generating high integrity carbon credits for the firms funding it. This represents a first for the legal sector. Eight firms have collaborated to purchase high-quality, high-integrity carbon credits, generating far more investment than could be funded on an individual basis.
Using the pro bono contribution of lawyers at Freshfields, as part of the One Million Hours project, the Charter has developed a robust framework agreement to act as a template that can be replicated and shared – across the legal sector, across professional services, and with client/law firm collaborations.
Working with Save the Children in Nandi, Kenya
Climate change is having an adverse impact on children in Save the Children’s core mission areas of education, health & nutrition and child protection. One billion children live in countries at extreme risk.
Save the Children is working with smallholder tea farmer cooperatives, community conservation groups and local government to develop a project that invests in ecosystem restoration and agroforestry. This initiative will provide multiple benefits for the community and the surrounding natural environment including: increasing climate resilience, reducing malnutrition and child poverty, and improving livelihoods.
In Nandi, Save the Children is working closely with an indigenous youth-led conservation NGO that establishes community-led nurseries and encourages planting of indigenous trees (including fruit trees in schools) to improve the health of waterways and habitat available for local wildlife.
How it works
- A founding investment of US$5 million over 10 years
- By pooling their sustainability budgets, Charter firms are pre-purchasing carbon credits
- Expansion of the collaboration to new firms is supported by a multi-party framework agreement
- Delivers high-quality, high-impact ICVCM compliant carbon credits alongside compelling benefits for children and communities
- Participating firms can choose which project funding rounds to participate in
- The model allows for SAVE to plan decades ahead, with community ownership and development from day one.
A ground-breaking project:
- A new strategic direction, led by Save the Children’s impact investing and innovative finance vehicle, SCGV – using the voluntary carbon market, as part of a blended finance approach, to support communities for the long-term
- It provides a model for how Voluntary Carbon Markets could evolve by offering high-integrity, high-quality credits through NGOs
- A first for the legal industry in terms of collaboration for greater impact
- Creates a replicable template for the private sector and family offices to drive social-environmental impact, while offsetting their unavoidable emissions in a meaningful way (which avoids greenwashing)