Our Approach to Green Accountability
Our approach will focus on four key sectors: The Voluntary Carbon Market, Renewable Energy, Waste and Recycling, Conservation and Reforestation.
The Voluntary Carbon Market
The Voluntary Carbon Market (VCM) holds immense potential to mobilize climate finance, uplift local communities, and drive decarbonisation. Yet, too often, the promised benefits fail to reach the communities on the ground.
The VCM is expanding rapidly as companies and governments seek to offset emissions through tree planting, forest conservation, and clean energy projects. But these initiatives don’t always deliver the promised social, environmental, or economic benefits for communities nearby. Our approach gives local people a way to track whether carbon credit projects are respecting land rights, providing fair jobs, avoiding harm, and delivering promised local co-benefits.
By tracking and verifying a project’s promised local community co-benefits, we can help the VCM deliver on its promise for both people and planet: improving the quality of carbon projects by providing reliable, ground-level insights that help projects stay on track, resolve issues early, and showcase positive local community impacts while ensuring meaningful, fair, and lasting benefits for the community where these projects take place.
Renewable Energy Projects
Green energy schemes like wind farms, solar parks, and bioenergy plants are vital for tackling climate change – but they also need to deliver fair co-benefits to the communities they are built in. Our green accountability approach allows local residents to monitor whether promises made by renewable energy developers – such as job creation, community funds, or land access – are being kept. Citizen monitors can report concerns like construction disruption, unmet promises, or safety issues via our app, helping to ensure these projects are accountable and truly sustainable.
Waste Management Projects
From new recycling plants to waste-to-energy facilities, these projects can bring environmental benefits – but they can also impact local people through noise, traffic, and air quality concerns. Our approach gives residents a simple, trusted way to track whether operators are meeting their environmental and social obligations, and report issues when they arise. Community monitors can flag odour problems, public access issues, or other broken promises, creating transparency and encouraging faster resolution.
Conservation and Reforestation Projects
Tree planting and habitat restoration projects are booming as tools to fight climate change and nature loss – but they must deliver benefits for both the planet and local people. Our approach enables local citizens to monitor these projects, tracking whether promised jobs, land use agreements, and community co-benefits are respected. Trained community monitors can log issues such as broken land access promises, creating a public record and supporting fairer outcomes.
CSO & Public Bodies Strengthening in Green Accountability: Integrity Action will provide our expertise to organisations and governmental bodies who want to develop and implement citizen-centred accountability mechanisms to improve their climate and nature adaptation or mitigation activities. We will provide inclusive and safe platforms for citizens voices to be heard and support them to interact and work collaboratively with duty bearers.