CO2 is a potent greenhouse gas and we are all responsible (to widely varying degrees) for adding to the (c)arbon level in the Earth’s atmosphere. Carbon offsetting, using verified carbon credits, is a way to take responsibility for your actions. When we do things that burn fossil fuels, directly (like driving a car) or indirectly (like using electricity), offsetting can compensate for the fuel burn carbon we have released. If you burn it, balance it! This works for individuals or businesses.
Offsets are simply carbon credits that are created and accounted for in a transparent and public way. There are many different ways to do this. Project developers can use man made technology like wind turbines, damns and simple stuff like efficient cooking stoves. Or we can create projects that are natural, working with the power of ecosystems to take carbon out of the Earth’s atmosphere. Either way, a project gets designed to create a carbon benefit (e.g. less coal gets burnt to create electricity because more electricity is coming from renewables like wind power) or more relevant to C-Level, a project is designed around either protecting forests or creating them.
This works with nature and uses probably the best technology we will ever have – trees! Trees have really got it together on the planet. They take CO2 in and give out Oxygen through photosynthesis. The CO2 gets locked away into the wood of the tree and into the soils of the forest. Forest carbon offsets are all about growing forests to do this. They can also be about creating carbon credits by intervening to stop deforestation happening to what remains of the earth’s existing forests.
All of this can be done with indigenous trees and local communities – or without them!
There are several standards that have been created to ensure projects have good methodologies and to oversee verification of the performance of the projects. Plan Vivo (Living Plan) is the original standard for carbon credits and is the best one for also accounting for ecosystem and community benefits from projects. The standards are important in that they help demonstrate credibility and they also create the carbon credits on behalf of the projects. When this happens, the credits get added to project accounts on the international registers, like Markit Environmental Registry. From this point they can be sold and allocated to anyone needing to offset their carbon footprint. The use of these registries keeps track of available credits and makes this publicly visibly. It’s clear and increasingly sophisticated.
So basically, for C-Level Projects, this is how it works. We find a project developer who has worked with local communities to create a natural carbon offset project. The project will be verified under the Plan Vivo Standard and we will fund the project and help with project communications to get the stories out there. The carbon credits are called Plan Vivo Certificates (each being equivalent to one tonne of CO2) and we will sell each one on to people and businesses looking to use carbon offsets to balance their CO2 emissions. When we have calculated your carbon footprint, we can certify you as carbon balanced through Plan Vivo projects, ensuring you are taking the most rigorous and holistic action you can.
C-Level’s view is un-compromising. Offsetting is a viable and worthwhile action on carbon when 3 conditions are met:
First, having calculated or understood your carbon footprint from activities done in the past, using carbon offsetting is the only way to balance your historic footprint. The damage is done. Take action to carbon balance by offsetting. C-Level introduced the term carbon compensation to explain what people are trying to communicate when they use the term carbon offsetting.
Second, the offsetting project must be creating something of value in the world that did not exist before. The industry calls this ‘additionality’ and it means a genuine carbon benefit created by the project. When we invest in genuine projects we create genuine benefits that meet the criteria of additionality.
Third, it’s vital to look at the bigger picture. A narrow focus on the short term and on just carbon will be of less value than a more holistic approach that looks at the whole system and all the relationships created by the new project. Our view is that the most holistic and long term projects are designed with both nature and people in mind. Projects that harness the combined power of ecosystems and communities to create carbon benefits in the form of credits to be used for offsetting your impact.
Natural and indigenous projects that are well designed and run create verified carbon offsets. But the best go way further. If you choose carefully, you can find projects that by their very nature are enormously beneficial to ecosystems and communities. For example, protecting existing forests, and encouraging their regeneration will impact big time on the life of the whole ecosystem. Biodiversity will benefit. Rivers and streams will flow. Soil erosion will be reversed. All of these ecological benefits will also benefit the people who live in and around the projects. Not just that, but the best projects will be designed with full involvement of the local community and they will also receive payments and livelihood benefits as money flows to them from the sale of holistic carbon credits.
CommuniTree for example, is now creating employment for hundreds of people and is becoming a significant source of income to local communities across an expanding area in Northern Nicaragua.
Carbon offset projects we love and work with
CommuniTree is just one example of a project we are connecting businesses and individuals to for the purposes of carbon offsetting. Like many of our projects, it is award-winning. It has been featured in a feature documentary produced by Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, and is increasingly visited by people from other countries who are inspired to learn about the project’s sophisticated ways of both monitoring tree planting and also ensuring that people are earning income into the long term (without which any reforestation programme can be jeopardised).
Mikoko Pamoja, A Blue Forest project that is empowering a coastal village in mangrove forest conservation, received the UN Equator Award in 2017. We made a 101 visions micro-documentary film with the project and the project has attracted the attention of the Leonardo DiCaprio Foundation, who are funding the approach.
In June 2019, a second of our projects, Hadza Hunter Gatherers, under the Plan Vivo global standard has received The Equator Award for outstanding nature based solutions to sustainable development and will be picking up further funding at the UN Development Programme’s New York Award ceremony.
UNDP’s Achim Steiner stated, “Every day, thousands of local communities and indigenous peoples around the world are quietly implementing innovative nature-based solutions to mitigate and adapt to climate change. The Equator Prize is both a recognition of their exceptional ideas and a way to showcase the power of people and grassroots communities to bring about real change.”
Of course, there are a great number of tree planting projects around the world, but many lack the long term stability created by these award winning community-driven Plan Vivo projects.
Carbon offset projects we don’t work with
When the UK Government first announced its offsetting action on the carbon emissions from departmental flights, we were massively underwhelmed to hear that one of the main projects was to be creating the carbon offset credits in Thailand. Sounds interesting, but wait, the project was all about paying an industrial pig farming business to clean up the septic ponds of pig excrement that where releasing methane (another much more potent greenhouse gas that has a CO2 equivalent some 30 times that of CO2 itself). Technology doing its job yes, but no account being taken of the big picture. Industrial meat production. Not a project we would touch with a cattle prod. Many technological offsets have similar issues. Carbon offsets from hydro-dams being another example of narrow focus on the single issue of carbon.
Individuals (as well as organisations and governments) can and do buy carbon offsets. C-Level has been providing this service since 2000. What we are seeing now is a massive new level of interest in this as an option, and again, we would offer our uncompromising view on the viability of carbon offsetting with C-Level
Flight carbon offsetting is a common way for individual action on carbon footprints. Individuals purchase carbon credits (in our case Plan Vivo Certificates verifying carbon uptake, biodiversity and sustainable livelihood benefits) from what is called the Voluntary Emissions Reduction (VERs) market .
C-Level offers two options for individuals to take action on carbon. First through the Flight Carbon Calculator Balance My Flight, and second Balance My Life which allows you to purchase a set number of Plan Vivo certificates to offset exactly the amount of CO2 you need. So through these two routes, whole families are offsetting their holiday flights, and some people are offsetting average carbon footprint for people living in Europe. Anything is possible, so please just ask us…
