Carbon offsets: greenwashing or genuine commitment?

This ESL worksheet explores key topics around carbon offsets, sustainability, and corporate climate pledges. Ideal for upper-intermediate learners, this resource includes real-life examples, group discussion tasks, and vocabulary practice to support critical thinking and language development around climate change, corporate responsibility, net-zero emissions, renewable energy, and greenwashing. Other lessons you might like are: “Corporate social responsibility“, “Greenwashing“, “Green offices”, “Sustainable hotels“, “How we get tree planting wrong“, and “Phrasal verbs: environment“.

Speaking: First, learners match different company types (e.g., airline, fast fashion brand) with their main sources of carbon emissions. Then, they discuss what their company does, its carbon emissions sources, current environmental efforts, and public green pledges.

Vocabulary: Key terms such as emit, greenwashing, pledge, and decarbonize are reviewed and practiced through sentence completion.

Listening: Students watch a video titled “The Big Problem with Carbon Offsets” and complete 3 listening comprehension activities, and engage in a post-listening discussion.

Reading and speaking: Students read about 8 common carbon offset project types (e.g., reforestation, regenerative agriculture, blue carbon) with pros and cons listed for each. Then they work in pairs or groups to rate each project on effectiveness, cost-efficiency, long-term impact, and community benefit, then present their preferred option.

Vocabulary Review – Crossword Puzzle: A crossword puzzle helps reinforce key terms from the lesson using clue-based word recall.

For more speaking practice, you can use the conversation cards.