aDryada’s Position on SBTi’s Second Draft Standard

As a company with a mission to restore Nature at a large-scale to high integrity standards, while remaining feasible and bankable, aDryada welcomes SBTi’s second draft of the Corporate Net-Zero Standard. To fight climate change effectively it is crucial that corporate net zero trajectories are ambitious and aligned with climate science, while at the same time being attractive and operational for companies.

aDryada considers this second draft of SBTI’s standard to be clearly reflective of SBTi’s aim to better strike this balance. We need an SBTi framework that facilitates the recognition of efforts made by companies to combat climate change, while at the same time ensuring that these are ambitious enough so that the net zero goal remains intact. The draft standard is even more precise in its alignment with the objectives of the Paris Agreement since it holds the potential to unlock new corporate financing for nature-based carbon removal projects. This is a crucial change to achieve the ambition of 5 GT of removal per year by 2050.

Nevertheless, aDryada holds that the framework could be even more impactful for climate if three modifications were made:

• SBTi should require companies to only finance carbon projects certified by methodologies that are approved by ICVCM’s Core Carbon Principles under the “Optional Recognition Program” and “Post 2035 Responsibility Requirement”;
• Counting carbon credits towards an NDC while they are used in a company’s trajectory to Net zero should not be considered as double counting;
• Under the right conditions, nature-based removals should be considered “long-lived removals”, capable of sequestering carbon for centuries to millennia.