Retirement

Overview

In short: retiring an offset means it is claimed against an individual or organization's carbon footprint, and it has been taken out of circulation to ensure it can only be claimed once. An analogy for all of this is a ticket for a movie. You could pass the ticket around, but eventually, someone is going to go see the movie. At that point, the ticket is torn up so nobody else can use it. In the case of an offset, the term for tearing up the movie ticket is “retirement."

Reason

Once units are retired, they are no longer available to be bought or sold and can no longer be used to offset emissions. This is important to maintain the integrity of carbon markets and prevent double-counting of emissions reductions. The most important thing is to make sure the retirement process is verifiable and transparent so that there is no doubt the offset has been retired and can no longer be used.

There are a few different ways to retire an offset. The most common is to submit it to a retirement platform like the Verra Registry or the Gold Standard Impact Registry. These platforms keep track of all the information about offsets, including when they were retired and by whom. Another method includes retiring directly through the platform the offsets were purchased from.