Amazon is expanding the types of carbon credits available to companies through its Sustainability Exchange, helping businesses lower emissions across their operations and supply chains. The e-commerce giant now offers lower-carbon fuel (LCF) inset credits and superpollutant refrigerant destruction credits, giving companies more tools to take meaningful climate action.
The Sustainability Exchange: A Hub for Climate Action
Amazon launched the Sustainability Exchange in 2024 to provide resources, playbooks, and guidance for companies aiming to meet net-zero goals. It shares knowledge on measuring emissions, transitioning to clean energy, decarbonizing operations, and purchasing high-quality carbon credits.
Since its launch, the Exchange has expanded its offerings to support companies at every stage of their climate journey, especially those within Amazon’s supply chain. However, these credits are available only to companies with net-zero targets across Scope 1, 2, and 3, who measure and report emissions regularly and commit to implementing decarbonization strategies aligned with climate science.
The platform now includes a wider variety of carbon credits, making it easier for companies to take action beyond their own facilities.
Lower-Carbon Fuel (LCF) Inset Credits: Decarbonizing Transportation the Smart Way
Transportation is one of the most challenging sectors to decarbonize. Long-haul trucking, aviation, and maritime shipping often rely on heavy payloads and lack sufficient electrification infrastructure. Thus, lower-carbon fuels provide a practical path to reduce emissions while using existing infrastructure.
How They Work
LCF inset credits help companies support the production of cleaner fuels such as renewable diesel, biodiesel, and sustainable aviation fuel, which can reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 65–80% compared with conventional fossil fuels.
These credits, a type of Environmental Attribute Certificate (EAC), allow companies to claim emission reductions by investing in cleaner fuel production even if they cannot directly use the fuels themselves. For instance, a company operating diesel trucks can purchase renewable diesel inset credits to support cleaner fuel production and receive recognition for the equivalent emissions reductions, enabling transportation decarbonization without changing existing operations.
Amazon’s Approach
Amazon prioritizes efficiency and electrification first, then uses LCFs where access is limited. The company tracks the full life cycle of fuels—from feedstock production to final use—using third-party verification and globally recognized methodologies. Waste-based feedstocks, like used cooking oil and agricultural byproducts, are prioritized for their high emission reduction potential and support for circular economies.
The Advanced and Indirect Mitigation (AIM) Platform helps companies account for and report on insets across sectors. Amazon’s methodology aligns with cross-industry standards while adapting to specific sectors, ensuring that results are accurate and verifiable.
Notably, Crane Worldwide Logistics is one company using Amazon’s LCF credits. Sustainability Director Carlos Pacheco said, “Partnering with Amazon on their carbon insets program helps us drive real reductions in sectors that matter most to our business.”
Superpollutant Refrigerant Destruction Credits: Tackling Methane, HFCs, and Black Carbon
Superpollutants, including methane, HFCs, black carbon, and tropospheric ozone, are significantly more potent than CO₂. Unlike CO₂, which can linger in the atmosphere for centuries, superpollutants last from a few days to around a century, meaning cutting their emissions can produce measurable results within decades.
Millions of tons of refrigerant gases remain in old equipment, materials, or stockpiles. Without intervention, these superpollutants could add billions of tons of CO₂ equivalents to the atmosphere. Reducing these emissions can prevent up to 0.6°C of warming by 2050, according to IPCC scenarios.
How They Work
Now these credits fund the safe destruction of potent greenhouse gases, such as methane and hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs), which trap far more heat than CO₂. By destroying these gases, companies can help slow global warming and achieve measurable climate benefits within decades.
Amazon’s Approach
Amazon sources refrigerants primarily from small businesses in developing countries and avoids large corporate or government stockpiles. Specialized facilities destroy gases using incineration or plasma-arc gasification, converting them into CO₂, water, and inert salts.
Furthermore, refrigerant destruction also helps the ozone layer recover faster, reducing harmful UV radiation, protecting ecosystems, supporting global food production, and benefiting human health.
It credits companies based on modeled leak rates over a maximum 10-year period, ensuring realistic and verifiable climate impact. Projects follow internationally recognized protocols and avoid double-counting emissions reductions.
Building a Robust Carbon Credit Strategy
As we understand now, Amazon’s carbon credit program allows companies to blend neutralization and inset credits, giving them flexibility to tackle Scope 1, 2, and 3 emissions while pursuing net-zero targets.
Insetting vs. Offsetting
- Insets: Reduce emissions directly within a company’s own supply chain.
- Offsets: Compensate for emissions by supporting external climate projects.
Neutralizing Remaining Emissions
While cutting emissions within its own operations remains the top priority, Amazon invests in climate mitigation efforts outside its value chain. This includes direct investments, advance purchase agreements, coalition building, new methodology development, and innovative technologies.
Despite its Climate Pledge commitment, its total carbon emissions rose to 68.25 million metric tons of CO₂ equivalent in 2024, a 6% increase from 2023. This growth was driven by data center expansion for AI and fuel use in its delivery fleet.
Amazon mainly uses carbon credits to complement its own emissions reductions. Its focus is on high-quality, science-based removal projects rather than offsetting ongoing emissions.
Key Purchases, Investments, and Strategy Context
The retail giant has committed to buying 250,000 metric tons of direct air capture (DAC) credits from 1PointFive’s STRATOS facility over 10 years starting in 2023. In addition, it sources credits through the LEAF Coalition to help protect Brazilian forests and invests in nature-based projects, such as preventing deforestation and restoring ecosystems.
More recently, Amazon expanded its platform to include lower-carbon fuel inset credits, like renewable diesel, alongside its existing nature- and technology-based removal credits. Early users include companies like Flickr and industries such as real estate and tech consulting.
In simple terms, these credits help Amazon reach its goal of net-zero emissions by 2040 under the Climate Pledge. The main focus is on removing leftover emissions after first improving energy efficiency and using renewable energy. While Amazon does not share the exact yearly volume of credits it buys, every credit is carefully checked for additionality, permanence, and transparency. This ensures credibility and addresses doubts about the voluntary carbon market.
The post Amazon Expands Its Carbon Credit Strategy with Lower-Carbon Fuel and Superpollutant Solutions appeared first on Carbon Credits.
The accounting differences that decide whether your nature investment shows up in inventory, in BVCM, or nowhere at all.
The question reaches a procurement team about three weeks before the next sustainability committee meeting. Someone has read about insetting. Someone else has just signed off on an offset purchase. The CSO wants to know if the two are interchangeable. The answer is no, and the GHG Protocol Land Sector and Removals Standard is the reason why.
This article walks through what each term means at audit-grade specificity, what the standards actually say about how each gets counted, and how to decide which tool fits which target. The insetting vs offsetting question is one of the most-searched in corporate climate strategy, and one of the most poorly answered. By the end of this piece, you should be able to brief a committee on the difference without notes.
The two definitions, in plain English
Offsetting means buying carbon credits generated outside your value chain and retiring them against your residual emissions. The reduction happens somewhere else, financed by you, and the credit is the receipt.
Insetting means investing in emission reductions or removals inside your own value chain, typically with suppliers, where the reduction is directly linked to the products and services you buy. The reduction happens inside the boundary of your Scope 3 inventory, and the accounting treatment is fundamentally different.
The shorthand from the University of Oxford’s Nature-based Insetting Initiative is useful: insetting is what you do with the supply chain you have; offsetting is what you do with the supply chain you do not have.
What the GHG Protocol Land Sector Standard actually says
The GHG Protocol Land Sector and Removals Standard, finalised in 2024 after a multi-year pilot, sets the rules for how land-based emission reductions and removals enter corporate inventories. The Standard distinguishes between inventory accounting (Scope 1, 2, and 3) and project or intervention accounting (a separate methodology for crediting).
For insetting, the practical implication is that supplier-level interventions, when properly measured and attributed, can reduce your Scope 3 category 1 (purchased goods and services) emissions in your inventory. The reduction is not a credit retired against the inventory; it is a lower inventory number, period.
For offsetting, the credit is retired separately. It can be reported as a contribution toward a net-zero claim under the SBTi Beyond Value Chain Mitigation framework or as part of a VCMI Carbon Integrity claim, but it does not lower the inventory number.
A practical consequence: if your Science Based Target requires a 50% absolute reduction in Scope 3 emissions by 2030, insetting moves you toward the target. Offsetting does not. This single point of difference reshapes the procurement decision.
When insetting counts toward Scope 3 (and when it does not)
Insetting counts toward Scope 3 only when several conditions are met:
- The intervention must occur with an entity in your value chain.
- The emissions reduction or removal must be measured against a defensible baseline.
- The reduction must be attributed to your share of that supplier’s output, not double-counted with other buyers.
- It must follow the inventory accounting rules in the GHG Protocol Land Sector Standard, not the project accounting rules used to generate credits.
The most common failure mode is double counting. If your supplier sells the same reduction as a credit on the voluntary market and also reports it to you as a Scope 3 reduction, the math breaks. The Standard requires you to address this risk, typically by purchasing and retiring the supplier-issued credit as part of your inventory or by contractual provisions that prevent the supplier from selling the reduction twice.
When insetting does not count toward Scope 3: when the intervention sits with a supplier you do not buy from, when the baseline is not defensible, when the attribution is unclear, or when the documentation does not survive audit. Those cases default to Beyond Value Chain Mitigation, which is still useful but operates on a different ledger.
The procurement and supplier engagement question
Insetting is harder than offsetting. That is the unfashionable truth most buyers eventually confront. Offsetting is a transaction; insetting is a relationship.
To run an insetting program, you need supplier mapping precise enough to know which farms or facilities sit at which Scope 3 boundary. You need an engagement model that gets suppliers to participate, which usually requires multi-year commitments and shared economics. You need an MRV architecture that measures the right things and produces audit-ready documentation. And you need a contractual structure that prevents double counting and protects both sides.
The trade-off you receive in return is significant. Reductions count against your inventory rather than your residual. Supplier relationships deepen, which protects sourcing continuity. Yield and quality improvements often follow regenerative interventions, which reduces your input cost over time. And the regulatory file, under CSRD, CSDDD, EUDR, and the SBTi FLAG Guidance, is materially stronger.
Choosing the right tool for the right target
A practical decision rule. If your target is a science-based Scope 3 reduction and you operate in a FLAG sector or source FLAG commodities, insetting is the structurally correct tool. If your target is a net-zero claim that includes neutralising hard-to-abate residual emissions outside your value chain, BVCM via high-integrity offsets is the structurally correct tool. Most companies with material Scope 3 exposure need both, in different proportions, sequenced over time.
The sequencing matters. Insetting takes longer to stand up but produces a permanent reduction in the inventory. Offsetting can be transacted faster but does not change the inventory and now sits under tighter claim restrictions. Treat them as complementary tools with different jobs, not as substitutes. The Accountability Framework Initiative and the IUCN Global Standard for Nature-based Solutions both provide useful guardrails for the insetting side, with biodiversity, human rights, and benefit-sharing requirements that go beyond carbon math.
If you are mapping a Scope 3 reduction roadmap and need to scope which interventions count toward your inventory versus which sit in Beyond Value Chain Mitigation, the carbon and sustainability experts at Carbon Credit Capital can help you structure a nature-based supply chain investment program that fits your FLAG exposure, your target architecture, and your audit horizon. Schedule a consultation.
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