Ton-year

This project implements two widely referenced ton-year accounting methods.

Ton-year accounting refers to a family of approaches that quantify the benefit of temporarily storing carbon dioxide that might otherwise enter the atmosphere and exacerbate climate change. We’ve noticed growing interest in using ton-year accounting to generate carbon offsets – an arrangement that uses temporary storage of CO₂ to justify the on-going carbon pollution.

We originally wrote this code as a way to improve our understanding of the climate science, math, and assumptions underlying ton-year accounting methods. By sharing our code, we hope to help facilitate deep thinking about how we value temporary carbon storage. We wrote a short explainer documenting what we’ve learned so far.