A muchbetter guide to Carbon Offsetting for Travel

Love travel? Worried about your carbon footprint. Not sure if you should offset? Carbon Offsetting is a murky and controversial topic, so we wanted to clear the waters a bit for you.

What is Carbon Offsetting?
In a nutshell, when you buy carbon offsets you are putting money towards schemes which supposedly reduce or replace your carbon emissions (somewhere else). Examples include new renewable/zero carbon energy projects, energy efficiency programs or tree planting schemes.

Commercial carbon offset companies such as Climate Care help you estimate your carbon emissions from a journey, and give you a price to 'offset' those emissions through investing in a variety of projects. Once you have offset, you are normally given a certificate to prove it - i.e. you emitted x tonnes of carbon, then paid to remove x tonnes from the atmosphere, or stopped x tonnes from entering it somewhere else. Congratulations - you are 'Carbon Neutral'! Simple hey?

So it is worth buying Carbon Offsets?
Unfortunately many commercial offsetting schemes have little or no genuine impact on carbon reductions, and the schemes can also create new problems. Despite this, they have been co-opted and sold by many industries, including the travel industry, as a solution, when in reality they are nothing more than an excuse and a license to carry on as normal. Read our summary of the problems of carbon offsetting here.

We remain sceptical of the message put out by commercial offsetting programs that you can be 'carbon neutral' simply by offsetting. As the Friend of the Earth stated in their 2009 report on carbon trading schemes, carbon offsets are a dangerous distraction from more meaningful action.

However, we do believe the highest quality projects not only result in genuine emissions reductions and clean energy development, but can also have positive secondary benefits by providing employment, protecting biodiversity, or by increasing the reliability of electricity supply. Above all, increased investment in renewable and low carbon energy technology should surely be seen as a positive step.

For these reasons Forum for the Future, the sustainable development charity, have put carbon offsetting at the bottom of a hierarchy of measures to combat carbon emissions from travel: Go local, go overland, go longer, go direct, offset.

Alternative - Carbon Donations
Perhaps there is an even better route. Donating to appropriate charities working to reduce carbon emissions and develop clean alternatives seem to us to be a muchbetter alternative to carbon offsetting. For us, that means donating to the Converging World.

But remember, they are not to be treated as an alternative to actual meaningful action to cut your carbon emissions.

Still want to offset?
Even if you choose to go and offset elsewhere, please do check it out first.

• We recommend offsets that are certified to the Gold Standard, or at least the Voluntary Carbon Standard. Always use offset providers that have signed up to the ICROA Code of Best Practice.
• Be wary of tree planting ‘offsets' and bio fuel projects - these are notoriously problem ridden schemes.
• We also thought that these guys at Carbon Retirement were a more direct and effective approach to the offsetting principle. However, they perhaps do not bring the social benefits eg. electricity to developing rural areas that The Converging World do.

Further reading

If you want a more specialised and detailed resource, we found the Carbon Offset Research and Education website to be excellent.