Negotiations to prevent dangerous climate change are moving painfully slowly, despite the science demanding urgent carbon cuts. Developed countries are reluctant to set themselves reduction targets consistent with what the science demands and provide necessary financial flows to developing countries. To compound this failure, they are also seeking to continue and extend the use of offsetting.

This report provides the evidence to show that offsetting does not work and will not work. Offsetting does not lead to promised additional emissions cuts in developing countries; it delays essential structural change in developed-country economies; and it institutionalises the idea of cuts in either the north or the south, when science demands reductions in both.