CAPTION: Conti wants to reduce CO2 burden with reforestation - additional costs possible. (picture alliance / Geisler-Fotopress)
German automotive parts company Continental wants to link unavoidable CO2 emissions from its own production, suppliers, and recycled products directly with investments in climate protection projects. The DAX-listed corporation is offering its first customers the option of offsetting these kinds of greenhouse gas quantities against "negative emissions" that arise in the balance sheet, for example from reforestation. The aim is to accelerate the net reduction of CO2 in this way, Steffen Schwartz-Höfler, Conti's head of sustainability, told dpa. This could also involve additional costs, the distribution of which is still being negotiated.
According to Schwartz-Höfler, the auto supplier's "immediate program" is not about buying its way out of its obligations. "The concept of negative emissions goes beyond the purchase of classic compensation certificates," he explained. It looks at entire supply and post-use chains, he said. "It just doesn't mean that CO2 emissions are simply reduced somewhere else, resulting in only somewhat fewer emissions somewhere else, but that de facto CO2 is taken out of the atmosphere - primarily from forests, but also, for example, by binding greenhouse gases in peatlands or other soils."
He said Conti has built up a network of partners to whom certain quotas are assigned - "distributed all over the world." It's about reforestation, but also about creating additional forest areas or sustainable forest management, he explained. Some projects are located in China, he says, "where an early start was made, for example, to prevent further desertification through the overuse of land."
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