Technical documentation

The Double Declaration Protocol

Version 2.1 · Issued by the Institute for Applied Counterfactuals · Reviewed internally · Approved by the author

Conventional offsetting suffers from a structural weakness: the offset must correspond to a real reduction occurring somewhere else, undertaken by someone else, at a cost. The Double Declaration Protocol removes this dependency by relocating both the emission and the reduction inside a single declarant.

1. Background

An offset is a claim that emissions elsewhere are lower than they would otherwise have been. The phrase would otherwise have been is doing all of the work. It refers to a baseline: a description of a world that did not happen, against which the world that did happen is scored favourably.

Because the baseline is counterfactual, it cannot be measured. It can only be asserted. The sector has developed extensive machinery — validators, registries, standards bodies — to constrain how far that assertion may stray from plausibility. DDP dispenses with the machinery and keeps the assertion.

2. The protocol

1. Declaration. The declarant states an activity they intend to perform once. Let its emissions be B.
2. Amplification. The declarant commits to performing the activity twice. The baseline is revised to 2B. This is now the world that would otherwise have been.
3. Revocation. The declarant revokes one instance. Measured against the revised baseline, this is an avoided emission of B.
4. Retirement. The avoided emission B is retired against the performed emission B. Net emissions are zero. A certificate is issued.

2.1 Formal statement

For declared activity with per-instance emissions B and instance count n:

• Baseline: E_baseline = 2nB
• Performed: E_performed = 2nB − nB = nB
• Avoided: E_avoided = nB
• Net: E_net = nB − nB = 0

The result is independent of B. This is presented in our materials as robustness. It is more accurately described as the emission factor never having mattered.

3. Additionality

Additionality asks whether the reduction would have occurred without the offset. Under DDP the answer is unambiguous: the second instance was created solely in order to be revoked, and would not have existed otherwise. The revocation is therefore fully additional to a baseline that is itself fully additional to reality.

4. Permanence

Forestry offsets can burn down. A DDP revocation cannot be reversed by fire, drought, or logging, because there is nothing present to destroy. Permanence is total.

5. Leakage

Leakage occurs when a reduction in one place causes an increase in another. DDP is subject to a single leakage pathway, in which the declarant performs both instances after certification. This is addressed in Section 7.

6. Verification

Verification is performed by the declarant. Independent verification was evaluated during the drafting of v1.0 and found to introduce every one of the constraints the protocol was designed to remove.

7. Known limitations

The protocol produces no reduction in atmospheric carbon. It produces a certificate. Where the objective is a certificate, the protocol is fully effective. Where the objective is a reduction in atmospheric carbon, the recommended methodology is to perform the activity zero times, which requires no protocol, no certificate, and no institute.

8. Relationship to existing standards

DDP differs from established voluntary-market methodologies principally in candour. The mechanism — inflate a baseline, claim the gap — is not novel. Our contribution is to perform it in a single step, in public, on a webpage, for free.

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