Carbon offsetting in the UK: which credits actually compensate your emissions in 2026

Quick answer: how the UK carbon offset market really works

Carbon offsetting, in plain English

A carbon offset is a promise. You pay someone to either avoid emitting a tonne of CO2 somewhere else, or to remove a tonne of CO2 from the atmosphere. In exchange you get a certificate that says you have "cancelled out" one tonne of your own emissions. One offset credit equals one tonne of CO2 equivalent (CO2e, the unit that combines all greenhouse gases on the same scale).

The UK voluntary market is split into two big families. Avoidance projects pay people not to emit (protecting forests, replacing coal stoves with cleaner ones, building a wind farm in a country that would otherwise burn coal). Removal projects physically take CO2 back out of the air (planting trees, restoring peatland, or engineered solutions such as direct air capture, where machines suck CO2 from the sky and bury it underground).

The catch: only one of these families is fully aligned with a net-zero climate. Avoidance is useful but does not undo your emissions, it just stops new ones somewhere else. Removal is the only kind that can truly "cancel" the CO2 you put up. That distinction matters more than any brand or label.

How the UK carbon offset market actually works

There are two distinct markets. Most "buy a carbon offset" buttons on websites send you into the second one.

The compliance market (UK ETS)

The UK Emissions Trading Scheme, run by the UK ETS Authority since 2021 (when the UK left the EU ETS), caps emissions from heavy industry, power stations and domestic flights. Firms that emit above their allowance must buy permits from firms that come in under. As individuals, we do not participate in this market, but it sets the underlying carbon price the country thinks one tonne of CO2 is worth: around £35 to £50 per tonne in 2026, depending on the auction. That number is a useful anchor for what serious offsetting should cost.

The voluntary market

This is where you, your business or a charity buys offsets out of choice rather than legal duty. It is global, fragmented, mostly online and worth roughly $1.7 billion a year (Ecosystem Marketplace, 2024 figure). Quality is policed by private standards. The four that matter for UK retail buyers:

• AVerra / VCS (Verified Carbon Standard). The biggest standard by volume. Strong on process, criticised on additionality for some forest project types;
• BGold Standard. Co-founded by WWF in 2003. Tighter on community co-benefits (water, health, gender). Generally seen as the higher-confidence label for community-scale credits;
• CPlan Vivo. Smaller, community-led. Often used for smallholder agroforestry;
• DACR / CAR / Puro.earth. Used for engineered removals (biochar, BECCS, direct air capture). Puro.earth specialises in durable removal credits.

The four tests every credit should pass

Whatever label is on the credit, you (or the standard on your behalf) need to be able to answer yes to four questions. These are the technical terms most articles skip:

• 1Additionality. Would the project have happened anyway without the offset money? If a wind farm was already going to be built because it is profitable, the credits it sells you are not additional, they are window-dressing;
• 2Permanence. Will the carbon stay out of the atmosphere for at least 100 years? A planted tree that burns in a wildfire releases its CO2 back. Geological storage does not;
• 3Leakage. Does the project just push the emissions next door? Protecting forest A while loggers move to forest B is leakage;
• 4MRV. Measurement, reporting and verification by an independent third party, with a public audit trail. Without MRV, the carbon claim is just a sales line.

Gold Standard and the post-2024 VCS rules build all four into certification. A credit sold without naming a registered project ID under one of these standards has none of these guarantees.

The Gandhi Project: how Selectra has offset emissions in practice

Selectra UK runs its carbon offsetting through a partnership with EcoAct, a climate consultancy founded in France in 2006 and now part of the Atos group. EcoAct has delivered more than 1,000 carbon projects worldwide and helped create over 20,000 jobs in developing countries. Each year, Selectra buys carbon credits from EcoAct, asks for them to be retired (cancelled, so no one else can claim them) on behalf of customers, and emails a certificate confirming the volume.

What the Gandhi Project actually does

Between 2019 and 2021, Selectra retired more than 200,000 carbon credits from the Gandhi Project, a wind power programme in Rajasthan, India, where coal still covers around 56% of national electricity demand. The project is registered under the Verified Carbon Standard (VCS).

Twenty-one wind turbines installed on site produce roughly 36 GWh of zero-carbon electricity each year, avoiding more than 33,000 tonnes of CO2e emissions every year compared with the Indian grid mix. Beyond the carbon arithmetic, the project funded:

• 80 schools supported by a grant system, helping lift school enrolment by 50% in Tidi (Udaipur District, Rajasthan);
• Food aid for more than 800 people in surrounding villages;
• A more stable and accessible local electricity grid.

In quality-credit terms, the Gandhi Project sits in the VCS-certified renewables band (good audit trail, strong social co-benefits). It is not a durable-removal credit. The honest framing is that it avoids emissions that would otherwise have come from coal, rather than physically pulling CO2 back out of the air. Both matter; they are not the same product.

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