Brazilian NGO Ecológica has been promoting the social benefits of carbon projects since long before "non-carbon" attributes became fashionable. Now, with voluntary carbon offset projects being judged (and priced) as much for their impact on local communities as for their impact on carbon emissions, they're taking their methodology global by teaming up with international market players and joining the gaggle of standards with links to registries.

31 October 2008 | Rice grows in boat-shaped husks that taste nutty-soft when steamed to perfection – a treat most of us never get to enjoy (and those of us who do aren't, as a rule, impressed). That's good news for Ceramicas Reunidas, a family-owned Brazilian brick production company that recently earned carbon credits for switching its fuel from rainforest trees to discarded rice husks.

It's a small project, designed to sequester just 16,000 tons of CO2 per year in trees that would otherwise have been chopped down, but the focus of the project expands beyond sequestration to the human dimension. The fuel switch and technology upgrade was carried out in accordance with Social Carbon Methodology (SCM), a set of procedures designed over the past decade to promote carbon offset projects that contribute to sustainable development in local communities.

Like the better-known Climate, Community, and Biodiversity (CCB) Standards, SCM is not a stand-alone tool that defines agreed-upon methods for measuring carbon capture itself. That's left to entities like the Voluntary Carbon Standard (VCS). Instead, SCM is a sustainability screen: it helps identify and promote "non-carbon" benefits flowing from projects that already meet the requirements of basic carbon standards.

"There will not be a separate certificate issued for Social Carbon credits and VCS credits," says Merlin. "Instead, the Social Carbon designation will be embedded in a tag on the VCS certificate, so it may say 'VCS/Social Carbon/001' or something like that."

"Social Carbon breaks sustainability into six 'resources' (see below), which is pretty comprehensive in terms of coverage of aspects of sustainability," says Jochen Gassner, Director of Climate Neutral for German carbon broker First Climate. "They've got their indicators for all of these aspects, which is a good complementary assessment to what the normal standards such as VCS and VER+ do."