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The Carbon Offset Administration Systems facilitates for the listing, transfer and retirement of carbon credits to offset carbon tax liabilities.
The South African Carbon Tax Offset system starts with the approval of a specific project by the relevant project standard. Standards allowed into the South African offset scheme include the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM), Verified Carbon Standard (VCS) and the Gold Standard (GS). (The Climate, Community & Biodiversity Alliance (CCBA) Standard is included under the VCS). All projects undergo the obligatory processes required for project registration and credits issuance by each specific standard.
The selected standards are responsible for the oversight and enforcement of the project approval and credit issuance process. The South African government has selected the standards and the Carbon Offset Administrator will monitor the listing and retirement of credits for compliance under the carbon tax.
There are four processes governing the Carbon Offset Administration System:
The granting of an Extended Letter of Approval (ELoA) for projects of offset credits;
Credit listing in the Ownership Repository;
Credit ownership transfer from project owner to tax payer; and
The retirement of credits to gain an offset certificate (i.e. to offset the liability of an entity that is eligible for the South African carbon tax) and submission to SARS.
Figure 1: Overview of carbon offset process
The Operations Procedure Manual provides specific guidance related to the processes and tasks within the ambit of control and function of the Carbon Offset Administrator. Further documentation is available from the documents section of the navigation menu of the left of this page.
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