What are the key factors that companies consider when selecting a carbon offsetting project on Patch's marketplace?

It depends on the ethos of the organization and the reason for why they’re seeking out a carbon offsetting project in the first place.

If it’s primarily compliance-driven, they’re typically just indexing on the most affordable way to fulfill the rules they have to follow.

If it’s more marketing-driven, there’s generally two angles that we’ve seen companies take. 

There’s marketing in a way that appeals to the scientific community, and then there's marketing that's going to resonate with consumers in an emotional or inspirational way.

In the compliance case, people are really just going to hit the bar that’s been set. They're not going to do more than that.

In the case of the marketing-driven use case targeting the scientific community, people are typically looking to invest in durable technologies: 1,000 or more years is what people treat as the gold standard. Some people use 10,000, but that’s the typical ballpark range, and that's going to beb technology like direct air capture and enhanced weathering.

Then you have the marketing-driven use case but targeting consumers, which sometimes can also be those kinds of high durability projects. If your average consumer is a bit of a techno-optimist, if you will, you might index on some of these human-engineering type solutions. 

In other cases, companies are focusing on enhanced nature-based approaches, whether that’s genetically-modified tree growing or whether it's satellite-monitored nature. That’s typically in the 100 year permanence range, which is still not bad, but it's not as robust as something that's 1,000 to 10,000 years from a permanence perspective.