Wren leverages BeZero Carbon insights to improve carbon offset evaluation

Wren recently made the decision to strengthen its carbon offset evaluation process by leveraging BeZero Carbon’s intelligence platform for the Voluntary Carbon Market. While Wren already thoroughly vets projects before including them in our Wren Climate Portfolio, assessing the quality of carbon credits is notoriously tricky. Understanding the risks associated with a specific project requires careful, time-consuming analysis. Now with access to the expertise of specialists at BeZero, Wren can speed up the project sourcing process while simultaneously expanding and deepening evaluation criteria.

BeZero’s intelligence platform provides Wren with insight into the likelihood that a given carbon credit will provide the CO₂e avoidance or removal benefits it claims. This is done using a risk-based evaluation framework that assesses six critical risk factors that inform credit quality:

1. Additionality
2. Over-crediting
3. Non-permanence
4. Leakage
5. Perverse Incentives, and
6. Policy

BeZero’s team of specialized, interdisciplinary experts conduct macro and micro analyses for individual projects to determine risks across these six categories. Ultimately, projects are assigned a rating based on a seven-point scale. These ratings help Wren understand in detail the risks associated with project types. You can read more about their approach to ratings here.

To date, BeZero has evaluated over 1 in 2 of credits outstanding on the Voluntary Carbon Market, across all sectors. By supplementing Wren’s existing evaluation approach with this rich data, Wren can better manage risk across project types and grow our portfolio of meaningful climate solutions with greater ease and reliability.

Building a diversified and impactful portfolio of projects to support is central to Wren’s mission. As Wren scales, leveraging external data sources developed by trusted scientists and researchers is essential because understanding the risks associated with diverse project types require diverse expertise. With BeZero’s insights, we can confidently add more projects to our portfolio that extend beyond the four types of climate solutions we are currently funding. For example, the platform will help us identify project developers generating high-quality credits from wetland ecosystems or grasslands.

We are excited to leverage these data to ensure Wren members make the greatest possible impact and move the needle on climate change!