What does Carbon Neutral mean?
Carbon Neutrality is a term bandied about quite a bit. In the interests of clarity, and in the absence of a genuine international standard definition, here is how Carbon Planet defines carbon neutrality with respect to ourselves and our clients.
As an Organisation
Carbon neutrality would mean that you have had your organisation's operations assessed in strict accordance with the GHG Protocol Corporate Accounting and Reporting Standard (or ISO 14064-1) and you have offset the resulting emissions via a formally certified carbon credit scheme.
You could extend the audit period back to the time of your organisation's inception and offset all of your emissions to date in order to claim true neutrality up to the present.
To claim your products and services are carbon neutral you need to have conducted an independent life-cycle analysis on each product or service to determine the embodied carbon emissions associated. This analysis needs to be independently verified and then resulting emissions need to be offset via a formally approved carbon credit scheme.
Both the Australian Greenhouse FriendlyTM scheme and the recent recommendations by the ACCC support this definition overall but differ on actual details. Greenhouse Friendly requires abatement only via Greenhouse Friendly approved credits for example.
See Carbon claims and the Trade Practices Act
For individuals
Individuals offsetting flights and so forth are recommended to only use flight calculators that include detailed documentation of their methods and assumptions. It is unreasonable to assume every person will calculate their personal emissions via a complete audit and so national averages may be used to determine typical figures for individuals.
Abatement must be done with formally approved carbon credits, and ownership of any credits bought must be transferred to the end user who must retire or surrender those credits.