Why Purchase Carbon Offset And How You Should Go About It

By Jonathan Bennett

With growing awareness of the threats of global warming, instruments like carbon credits and carbon offset are turning increasingly popular with individuals and businesses as an effective means to safeguard our environment.

If you want to make up for the adverse effects your activities have had on nature, you can buy a certain quantity of carbon offset in order to cancel out the harm caused by you. Purchasing a carbon offset implies that the money you invest will be channelled to projects such as wind farms that generate clean energy and reduce emissions.

Before going for carbon offset, you must first look at your everyday activities that lead to release of greenhouse gases. Common activities that account for a substantial proportion of carbon emissions for most individuals are use of cars, air travel, and household energy.

Once you have identified these activities, you should plan to get rid of some of them and lower some as far as practicable. This would allow you to reduce some part of your carbon footprint through your own initiative. For example, you can reduce emissions by driving less often, making use of fluorescent lamps, and fitting better insulation to lower energy usage on heating or cooling.

After you have considered the measures you can take to reduce emissions, you should make an estimate of your remaining carbon footprint, i.e., the amount of greenhouse emissions caused by your remaining actions that are not within your reasonable control. The method of calculating this footprint changes from one activity to another, but there are a lot of online calculators which can be of great help in this regard.

The offset purchased by you is used by offset providers to make up for the carbon emissions from your actions by lowering emissions in any part of the earth. You can put your money in one of the environment friendly projects provided by the offset providers, and each project has its own way of emission control. But you should be cautious before investing in a project. You must only put your money in recognised and authentic projects to avoid the possibility of the funds being misused. Projects that have passed authenticity tests conducted by genuine certifying bureaus are the most suitable ones to put money in, as they bear the stamp of approval and can be trusted.

Finally, you should gather enough information on the topic from various sources. Your investigation will yield names of the most authentic offset providers in the market and also the types of projects that are investment-friendly and you can also track where the scheme you have put your money in is heading.

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