In the fight against the global climate crisis, many companies and organizations have adopted climate targets. In most cases, the focus is on achieving climate neutrality of the individual company: Companies avoid or reduce their greenhouse gas emissions and offset residual emissions in order to "neutralise" their total emissions. This is usually done through the purchase of carbon credits. However, it is increasingly questionable to what extent this approach is globally effective, especially if the emission reductions achieved in the offset projects lead to double counting under the Paris Agreement.
With the contribution claim approach, an alternative model is now being developed with which companies can promote global climate protection via private financial contributions. A key difference is that the participating companies cannot count the emission reductions towards their own reported emissions with the aim of being "climate neutral", but declare this as a "climate finance contribution".
So far, however, this has not been widely implemented. In order to further develop the approach and test its practical application, the Foundation Development and Climate Alliance has commissioned the Wuppertal Institute to implement a transdisciplinary research project. Within the framework of this project, companies, scientists, project developers and representatives from politics and civil society will test how this approach can be designed and effectively implemented in practice. To this end, the project team will first sharpen the concept with the help of literature and then work out the central requirements for the concept together with the stakeholders. The stakeholders will be involved in several living labs, the results of which will be incorporated into a concept paper that will be further developed iteratively. The insights gained in the project will finally be recorded in a report and made available to the public.