Buyer Spotlight
The financial services company Wise (GB00BL9YR756) has scored the highest possible AlliedOffsets rating this month. It has been active every year in the VCM since 2020, both retiring credits and partaking in offtake agreements across a global spread of projects. Both of the company’s retirements at the end of October were brokered by SALT Global Tech in order to offset part of its FY26 footprint. These transactions comprised forestry and land use credits from Climate Action Reserve and biochar credits from Puro.earth. These were estimated to have been offered at around $15 and $159 respectively.
The last year has seen Wise re-strategise in an interesting way. A review of its carbon footprint revealed that Scope 3 made up the vast majority of its emissions impact, with purchased goods and services accounting for 35% in FY25. As a result, the company has pivoted away from its 2030 net zero target.
While this may initially seem like an admission of defeat, gunning for an unrealistic goal is ultimately an inefficient and ineffective way of tackling a company’s climate impact. Instead, “mission driven” Wise is targeting its investment in climate-vulnerable areas where the area is also expanding its operations through nature-based carbon removal projects, engaging with its supply chain to identify opportunities to reduce carbon emissions, and placing air travel restrictions on staff. Bucking the unfortunate trend of corporate sustainability departments and goals being sacrificed in terms of both staff and financial resources during periods of economic struggle, the Board at Wise approved a 60% increase in the ESG budget from 0.1% to 0.16% of underlying income.
Part of that finance has already been put to work. In September, Wise committed a further £1,000,000 in carbon removal project developer Opna for credits from Latin America and Asia-Pacific, both key regions in which Wise is expanding. The expanded collaboration brings the total commitment via Opna to £1.5m This is on top of Wise’s participation - as a Watershed customer - in a $58.3M in carbon removal offtake agreements from Vaulted Deep in 2024.
Read more about Opna’s use of AlliedOffsets’ market intelligence here.
Turning to a vastly different company, our second profile looks at the Chinese shipping company Cosco (BMG8114Z1014). November saw its largest volume of retirements, all targeted towards the greenhouse gas emissions generated during the construction of a number of five new ships*. These were all offset using sub-$1 credits from a CDM Mongolian wind farm; one of increasingly few retirements as the mechanism moves towards closing next year.
This round of activity is congruent with Cosco’s development of a lower-impact fleet in recent years. In January, its ship Green Rizhao became China’s first vessel to pass a full carbon-neutral evaluation by the China Classification Society, achieving zero carbon emissions during its construction. Cosco is working towards net zero by 2050; one of an increasing number of Chinese companies setting science-based targets.
The company has an ambitious three-stage decarbonisation plan. The first step, which it is at the end of, was focused on increasing the energy efficiency and reducing pollution associated with new builds, using more alternative fuels and propulsion technologies. It will now be moving on to exploring hybrid electric and mechanical engine systems to improve efficiency and flexibility in marine propulsion and Power battery to optimize vessel performance. In five years’ time, the third step of development will involve the installation of on-board carbon capture technology on 43 new pulp ships.
International maritime environmental regulations are an explicit driver of many of these developments. To align with FuelEU Maritime regulations, Cosco has created Monitoring Plans for each vessel, outlining clear methodologies for tracking energy consumption and emissions. Also, in response to the International Maritime Organization's (IMO) Carbon Intensity Indicator (CII), high-impact vessels and risk periods have been evaluated through to 2030. It has also established a CII, EU ETS, FuelEU carbon emission data visualization dashboard, showing the success of international regulation. However, there is scant information as to how much the company intends to rely on offsetting in the future.
*For those curious about the ships’ specifications and live movements, the names are as follows:
CSPC CRYSTAL (N1182)
CSPC SAPPHIR (N1186)
CSPC RUBE (N1185)
CSPC PEARL (N1184)
CSPC JADE (N1183)