Swiss carbon offset foundation to cut 10% of staff

Myclimate cuts around ten per cent of jobs Keystone-SDA

Myclimate will cut around 10% of its jobs by the end of the year. At the end of 2024, almost 200 employees were working for the foundation.

In an interview with public broadcaster SRF on Tuesday morning, director Kai Landwehr said that Myclimate had largely refrained from making redundancies. Some employees had also left the foundation voluntarily.

+ Get the most important news from Switzerland in your inbox

“For economic reasons, we have had to make some very significant savings since the beginning of the year, particularly in the area of costs,” said Landwehr. The management of the foundation is being centralised and those responsible in Switzerland and Austria have had to leave, as was revealed in the interview.

Some projects ‘not unjustly criticised’

In 2022, the market will have reached a peak with the sale of emission reductions. Offers to combat climate change have experienced turbulent times in the last two years, said Landwehr. Other organisations that implement carbon offset projects have also been affected. “In some cases, offers have been the subject of much debate and have sometimes been criticised, and not without good reason,” said Landwehr. Other offers that were created on the basis of new legislation have been slowed down by revised laws.

Myclimate also senses that companies are critically scrutinising their climate change commitments, “sometimes quite justifiably”, said Landwehr. If this is compounded by an economic situation that is not easy for companies, such commitments will decline.

What is your opinion? Join the debate:

Adapted from German by DeepL/ac

How we work

We select the most relevant news for an international audience and use automatic translation tools to translate them into English. A journalist then reviews the translation for clarity and accuracy before publication.  

Providing you with automatically translated news gives us the time to write more in-depth articles. The news stories we select have been written and carefully fact-checked by an external editorial team from news agencies such as Bloomberg or Keystone.

If you have any questions about how we work, write to us at [e-mail]