Frequently Asked Questions

When you fund a CO2 portfolio, you are supporting the highest impact projects we can find. We charge a simple subscription fee to cover our business expenses, which is clearly shown when you make a purchase. Aside from this fee, every dollar we receive is used to fund project activities that reduce emissions, remove carbon, protect natural carbon sinks, or support climate innovation.

Our vetting process for projects includes an assessment of costs to ensure funds are used responsibly. When projects involve Indigenous Peoples or local communities, we ensure that projects are collaboratively designed with free, prior, and informed consent. We prioritize projects that provide income or critical services for these communities.

We will provide you with several tools to demonstrate your impact so that you can be a positive voice for climate action.

• CO2 Certificate: Immediately upon funding a CO2 portfolio, you will receive a certificate highlighting your purchase. This will also include proof of the carbon credits you have earned from removals and reduction projects as they are issued and retired.

• MyCO2 Dashboard: When you log in to your CO2 account, you’ll find an up-to-date view of the portfolio(s) you’ve funded with all available project data and all details of the impact associated with these purchases.

• MyCO2 Performance Report: We will send you a report twice a year with clear metrics that demonstrate your impact, both in a summarized form and in full detail. Everything will be formatted so that you can easily copy the results into your own marketing or reporting tools.

• Communication toolkit: We will give you assets and suggestions to help you communicate your approach to employees, customers and investors.

• Regular project updates: The projects you are supporting have incredible and compelling stories.  We package these stories to make it easy for you to share through your social media, marketing or employee comms.

Yes, you will earn carbon credits for the removals and CO2 reduction projects in the portfolio. These are clearly identified in your dashboard, and come with transparent ownership.

However, it’s important to underline that a good climate strategy doesn’t focus on just getting to zero as fast as possible. That sort of approach leads to buying cheap offsets that don’t accomplish much. 

You will be a much more valuable company for the planet by instead seeking to achieve the greatest verifiable impact as quickly as possible. Your CO2 portfolio provides this impact. We recommend being transparent about your choice to prioritize quality over accounting tricks. We will arm you with all the communications tools you need to make this larger, more powerful claim.

Trust is our highest value, shaping every decision we make. We’ve worked hard to earn the trust of leading scientists, market experts, conservation groups, regulators, verifiers, registries, ratings agencies, and other climate organizations. In the process we’ve built a large and growing network of advisors who have validated our methodology and will continue to review our work over time.

We believe that transparency is central to trust, and therefore commit to being as transparent as possible about every aspect of our business. We’ll share the risks we see in our portfolios and let you know when and how we get things wrong. We invite you to learn with us and will provide you full visibility into any changes in our approach. Our pricing will always be clear and simple.

We’re optimistic about the impact of every carefully vetted project we include in our portfolios. But there are always risks - changes in scientific understanding, technology adoption, business risk, geopolitical dynamics, natural disasters, and more. This is where our portfolios truly shine. Every CO2 portfolio is diversified across different project types and risk profiles. When something goes wrong, specific projects might underperform but your portfolio as a whole will be minimally impacted.

CO2 serves businesses of every size. We are passionately focused on making it as easy as possible for any business to become a climate leader. CO2 is therefore designed to enable small companies with no climate expertise to act with confidence and ease, while also supporting the needs of large, demanding organizations with many teams. We have built a world-class team of climate, technology and business experts so you don’t have to.

Your climate strategy should include two components. The first is a reduction of the emissions associated with running your business. The second is a contribution to external programs that effectively impact climate change. You can think of the latter as your share of a collective responsibility. CO2 provides you with the easiest and most effective way to meet that collective responsibility.

Going beyond offsetting means evolving past the mindset of finding cheap carbon credits for the purpose of claiming carbon neutrality, recognizing that these rarely do much good for the planet.

Instead, you switch to spending your climate budget on whatever provides the highest measurable climate impact both within and beyond your company. You end up with detailed impact metrics and reports that more comprehensively reflect your climate leadership, without diverting attention or funding from your decarbonization efforts. You make strong progress to real net zero, and help lead others to do so.

CO2 has a deep well of climate, policy, and technology experience. Our team members are alumni of Conservation International, UNFCCC, World Bank, World Economic Forum, Salesforce, Yelp, Twitter, Amazon, and more. But we don’t expect you to take those credentials alone as enough.

We believe in partnering for success, and have developed a large scientific advisory team. These advisors help ensure we remain aligned with the most recent scientific understanding and carbon market regulations. All of our work is transparently displayed. We will update the project pages as project performance is monitored. Verification reports will also be published.

CO2 charges a transparent subscription fee to cover operating costs. This includes technology expenses, employing staff, project verification fees, legal services, etc. As we scale we hope to further reduce our costs and these fees so we can continue to maximize the impact of your funding.

CO2 has a 7 step due diligence process. We have a systematic process to ensure we can review as many projects as possible. Each project is evaluated on the basis of its submissions to CO2. We conduct internal due diligence, as well as use our scientific advisors for the deep science work.

Projects are assessed on their scientific basis for impact, but we also carefully evaluate co-benefits such as impact on nature, support for local communities, and how much of the financing reaches local populations. We are careful to write detailed contracts that enable us to ensure continual monitoring on performance over the lifetime of the project, and to capture insights we can feed back to portfolio funders.

Our 7 step process includes:

1. Supplier RFPs

2. Technical Review

3. Independent Verification

4. Risk Adjustments

5. Detailed MSA

6. Ongoing monitoring

7. Transparent performance reporting

In the UK and EU, purchases from CO2 are not subject to VAT, and we will not collect these fees from you. We are still required to ask for your VAT registration number to retain for our records.

If you are in a jurisdiction where our services are subject to VAT/ GST, we will provide you with a relevant receipt.

You can screenshot your MyCO2 Dashboard. Every quarter, we will send you a detailed report that include tools to make it easy for you to communicate impact to employees, customers and investors.