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Additionality
Also known as: Additional reduction, Adisionalitas
TL;DR
The principle that a carbon project's emissions reductions must not have happened without the carbon-credit revenue — the foundational integrity test.
Full explainer
Additionality is the central integrity principle of carbon crediting: a project's emissions reductions must be additional to a counterfactual world in which the project did not exist. Without additionality, a credit is just an accounting fiction (the reduction would have happened anyway). The two canonical tests are financial additionality (the project requires carbon revenue to be economically viable) and regulatory additionality (the project goes beyond what is legally required).
Additionality has been the central critique of legacy REDD+ baselines: if a forest was unlikely to be cleared even without the project, the credits over-state the avoided emissions. ICVCM's CCP framework includes explicit additionality assessment, and the move from VM0007 to VM0048 was partly driven by VM0007's looser additionality tests. KarbonLens reflects the principle in its reversal-risk sub-score: a project with consistent post-issuance forest loss is implicitly suspected of weak baseline additionality.
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