Row erupts over Verra’s ‘Avoided Baby’ carbon credits

REDD-Monitor received the following anonymous Guest Post this morning:

Row erupts over Verra’s ‘Avoided Baby’ carbon credits

A furious row has erupted between family planning groups, business leaders and even the White House over credits issued under Verra’s Avoided Baby carbon offsetting methodology. The new scheme was introduced only twelve months ago but has already generated 2.6 billion credits, more than all other types of voluntary carbon credit combined.

Not having babies is the single most climate-friendly action that people can take. The scheme’s advocates say that people with less children should therefore be rewarded with carbon credits they can sell on the open markets.

But competing claims about whether the Avoided Baby credits represent real and ‘additional’ carbon emission reductions, and who can claim them, have quickly emerged. The International Family Planning Association, which has received most of the credits so far, said its contraception campaigns since 1953 (the official back-dated start of its NextGen Neutral™ offset project) would not have been possible without the income from carbon credits, even though it had not actually received any money until last year. The International Rubber Union, representing condom makers such as Durex and Trojan, challenged this in a statement, claiming “Our internal records show that, as early as 1929, our Board intended carbon offsets to be an essential part of the condom industry’s income, therefore we should get the credits.”

Stepping into the row, a TruthSocial post from President Trump said he opposed all such credits as it “creates an unfair advantage for all those communist purple-haired liberal Woke PERVERTS who’ve been robbing the US economy for decades by refusing to have proper sex or making GREAT AMERICAN BABIES!!!!” To counter this, the US would deploy naval attack groups against “all countries with homos and foreigners, we’ve not even started yet but, gold, my ballroom, the greatest on Earth, it’ll soon be over.”

Avoided Baby credits are expected to be among the first available this year through the new global carbon offsetting mechanism set up under the Paris climate agreement. Japan and China are said to be particularly supportive. A spokesperson for the European Union said “We have some concerns about double-counting by issuing credits for both condom and contraceptive pill use but, frankly, so long as the credits are cheap, we’ll have them. We’re especially keen on such credits from Africa and the Middle East.”

Responding to criticisms that it had verified Avoided Baby projects which do not represent real carbon reductions, Verra’s Director for Communications Steve Szpinwick said “History has shown that the fight against over-population, especially in countries like Africa, can’t be won without carbon markets. We’ve amended the earlier draft of the Avoided Baby methodology, VM0069, which assumed a baseline of ten babies per family, so now only parents with seven or less children can claim credits. Compared to the biological breeding potential of humans, this is conservative, and empowers women. We’ve also introduced a new ‘leakage module’ to account for parents who surreptitiously have children with people who aren’t their partner.”

VM0069 was approved in December 2025 by industry self-regulator, the Integrity Council for the Integral Voluntary Carbon Market, as generating ‘High Integrity’ carbon credits. IC-IVCM director, Isi Noëvil, said “Our scrutiny committee, which consists entirely of Verra staff, spent at least ten minutes intensely analysing Verra’s Avoided Baby offsetting methodology, and could find nothing wrong with it”

Responding to questions about its certification of the 2.6 billion credits issued so far, a spokesperson for offsetting audit company, ÖkoVeritas TÜV GmbH, who wished to remain anonymous, said “We deny any responsibility or legal liability for anything, ever. In fact we don’t know how you found us, as we like to think we don’t really exist. Bye-bye.”

Shirley Guff, head of assessment for offset ratings agency BeCertain™ said Avoided Baby projects had so far achieved a rating of Baa BAA, meaning a 10-90% modal chance the project would achieve its specified carbon objectives within five years, assuming that the assumptions of the methodology complied at least 50% of the time to no more than three standard deviations of a moving average period of seven years within a normalised population. Guff said “I know, we don’t really understand what any of that means either, but it sounds good, and we have to make a living, right? Here’s my business card.”

Asked about the financial consequences of the controversy, Verra’s Szpinwick said “We don’t normally comment on specific finances but, seeing as you’re very cute . . . err, please don’t publish that . . . we’d make about five hundred million dollars in fees from issuing Avoided Baby credits in the next decade. And, frankly, we need it. But of course that doesn’t in any way influence whether we approve these types of credits or not. Anyway, even if they’re eventually found to be worthless, we’ve got lots of other junk credits that can be used to replace them . . . Oh, don’t publish that either, or I’ll f*cking sue you.”

A spokesman for the Vatican said “Pecunia pro arcenda infantibus? Deus bone. Forsitan consilia nostra recenseamus.”