Insets vs. Offsets: Finding the Right Balance with Better Soil Data
When it comes to corporate climate action, two approaches often surface: carbon offsets and carbon insets. Both can help companies reduce or balance their greenhouse gas emissions—but they work in different ways, and the strongest sustainability strategies often use both.
At EarthOptics, we provide the high-quality measurement and soil intelligence that make either path possible—whether you’re generating offset credits or proving insets within your supply chain.
Offsets: Acting Beyond Your Operations
Carbon offsets are projects that remove or reduce greenhouse gases outside your direct operations. Companies purchase these credits to compensate for their own emissions—supporting initiatives like reforestation, renewable energy, or methane capture.
Offsets are appealing because they’re accessible and scalable. A company can immediately balance part of its footprint while working on longer-term internal reductions. But they also come with challenges: verifying additionality, permanence, and avoiding double-counting can be complex and costly. High-quality offsets require rigorous monitoring and validation to maintain credibility.
Insets: Investing Inside Your Value Chain
Carbon insetting happens within your value chain—through activities that directly improve how your raw materials are produced or your suppliers operate. For example, a food company might partner with farmers to adopt regenerative practices that build soil carbon and reduce emissions.
Insets bring the climate benefits closer to home. They strengthen supplier relationships, improve soil health, and often create co-benefits like yield stability and biodiversity. While they can require more up-front coordination and data collection, they embed climate progress directly into the business model rather than outsourcing it.
Why the Best Strategies Combine Both
In practice, few companies can eliminate or inset all emissions at once. Most successful climate strategies start by balancing near-term needs with long-term goals:
- Use offsets for residual emissions that can’t yet be reduced internally
- Develop insets to cut emissions within your own supply chain over time
- Gradually transition from buying credits to generating and verifying your own impact
This hybrid model delivers both credibility and resilience—and it depends on accurate, verifiable data at every stage.
How EarthOptics Supports Both Approaches
EarthOptics delivers the measurement, modeling, and verification needed to power credible carbon projects—whether they’re offset or inset initiatives.
1. Precision Soil Carbon Measurement
Our TruCarbon analysis provides field-level soil carbon data that meets or exceeds registry standards. By combining proprietary sampling techniques, calibrated lab results, and machine learning, we dramatically reduce sampling costs while maintaining accuracy.
2. Registry-Quality MRV
From sampling design to reporting, our measurement, reporting, and verification (MRV) framework satisfies carbon registries and corporate audit requirements. This enables transparent, defensible data for credit generation or internal reporting.
3. Support for Supply-Chain Projects
For insetting programs, EarthOptics helps companies baseline soil carbon, track improvements, and quantify the benefits of regenerative practices across suppliers and regions. This creates a measurable foundation for scope-3 reductions and internal reporting.
4. Scalable Data and Insights
Our analytics dashboard aggregates soil, carbon, and management data across thousands of acres—giving sustainability teams visibility into where interventions deliver the highest carbon return.
Building Credible Climate Impact from the Ground Up
Whether your organization is generating offset credits, measuring supply-chain improvements, or blending both, success depends on one thing: trust in the data.
EarthOptics provides that foundation—combining precision field measurement with scalable modeling and clear reporting—so companies can pursue climate goals with accuracy and confidence.