Southern Africa - Clean Breaks: 500 New Ways to See the World - page 182

Keeping the carbon underground
The third option - investing in technologies that don't rely on fossil fuels and so don't produce the CO 2
in the fi rst place - is seen by many as the most attractive. The idea is to develop and provide cleaner
alternatives to fossil-fuel based methods of generating power and heat. This could be anything from
cleaner stoves for rural villages to wind turbines or small hydropower schemes. Many of these also have
added community benefi ts, such as reducing the amount of coal smoke people have to breathe, or
providing meaningful, sustainable employment.
WHICH CARBON OFFSETTING PROGRAMMES ARE WORTH USING?
With ever more organizations offering offsets, it can be increasingly hard to know where to turn. Carbon
Catalog ( W www.carboncatalog.org) rates over a hundred different organizations and provides detailed
information on how they operate, including how much a tonne of CO 2 nominally costs to offset with them,
and what percentage of your money actually goes to the projects they invest in. We can recommend the
following four schemes:
ANTI-DEFORESTATION ORGANIZATIONS
Cool Earth ( W www.coolearth.org)
The most high-profi le of the organizations, with a list of supporters that ranges from James Lovelock, the
scientist behind the Gaia theory, to Rough Guides founder Mark Ellingham. It's not a traditional offset
scheme in that you can't pay for a specifi c fl ight to be offset; instead you donate as much as you wish to
help protect areas of rainforest in Ecuador and Peru and support local communities.
The World Land Trust ( W www.carbonbalanced.org)
Over the last 25 years the trust, whose patron is David Attenborough, has protected and returned to
community ownership several thousand square kilometres of threatened forest. As well as fl ights, you can
offset journeys by motorbike, car, bus, tram and train.
RENEWABLE ENERGY SCHEMES
Atmosfair ( W www.atmosfair.de)
Developed by a German environmental NGO and a coalition of German tour companies, Atmosfair
provides impressively detailed information on the schemes it invests in and is refreshingly honest
about the limitations of carbon offsetting. Schemes funded vary from developing a hydropower plant in
Honduras to providing effi cient wood-burning stoves in Nigeria, thus helping to alleviate deforestation. Its
carbon calculator even allows you to select which aircraft you are fl ying in .
The Pure Trust ( W www.puretrust.org.uk)
A UK-based not-for-profi t organization, The Pure Trust invests your donations in clean energy projects
around the world, typically generating electricity through hydropower and biomass. The scheme is not
just for fl ights, and you can offset for all aspects of your lifestyle.