Claire

Compensating and reducing CO2

The Belgian initiative Claire supports companies in reducing their CO2 impact in the form of a tailor-made CO2 compensation pathway.

When companies cannot yet avoid CO2 emissions during their operations, they can seek to offset those emissions through Claire by offering financial support to local initiatives that actively pursue CO2 reduction. Claire uses ISO-certified CO2 certificates to formally regulate this offsetting, allowing a company to become carbon-neutral or even carbon-negative, although each company chooses how far it wants to go in offsetting.

Claire tries to keep carbon offsetting as local as possible, allowing companies to immediately experience the impact of offsetting even in the short term. For example, companies can support local farmers in their ecological journey, finance a forest plantation or help a school with its energy transition. The aim is not for a company to account for and sustain its CO2 emissions through CO2 offsetting. In fact, Claire combines the CO2 compensation pathway with a pathway to reduce CO2 emissions within the company itself. Thus, a company can apply compensation through Claire for three years and then actually try to reduce its own emissions in the fourth year. If a company later wants to offset again through Claire, it must be able to demonstrate that steps have also been taken to reduce emissions.