Overview of the project

Responding to climate change requires a global reduction in carbon emissions linked to human activity and the implementation of energy savings. To this end, international agreements, states and companies are setting ambitions by proposing “low carbon” trajectories. While this makes it possible to set a framework, local action and organisation are nevertheless necessary to extend the possibility of action to each actor in a territory, citizen, company and community.

The La Rochelle Zero Carbon Territory has set an ambitious goal: to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions by a factor of 4 between 2019 and 2040 and to ensure that our natural ecosystem can enhance its role as a carbon sink to sequester residual emissions. It therefore became necessary to equip ourselves with a local carbon contribution tool that would allow us to support, evaluate and enhance the energy and greenhouse gas savings made by all the actors in a territory. The Carbon Cooperative was thus created to implement two major levers of action by supporting the rise in competence of the actors:

1. Reducing greenhouse gas emissions
2. Increasing carbon sinks, which are “reservoirs” that store atmospheric carbon.

It also aims to develop customised tools, such as the implementation of specific carbon assessment tools, the evaluation of circular economy projects and the construction of methodologies for recognising reductions in GHG emissions and carbon sequestration (e.g. the Low Carbon Label). Finally, within the framework of the LRTZC project, the Carbon Cooperative is the structure dedicated to the implementation of a local carbon credit market.