More people than ever have realized that climate change poses an essential threat towards organized human life with its devastating effects becoming more obvious in recent years. We face a possibly catastrophic future if we continue emitting greenhouse gases and destroying natural habitats as before.
Therefore, being aware of your carbon footprint and trying to reduce it as much as possible has become extremely relevant in recent years.
While a change in eating habits towards plant based foods, upgrading home appliances to the energy efficient types, possibly installing solar PV panels on your roof and switching to public transport and biking helps, activities like travelling will still produce some emissions. To neutralize these emissions and live a greenhouse gas free live, the only option is offsets.
For individuals to select which offsets to buy is slightly more complicated than for companies, although in principle the same guidelines should apply:
- Find ways to reduce your own emissions first before buying offsets
- Buy offsets that are certified under the Gold Standard, Verified Carbon Standard or other established standards
- Choose carbon removals over emissions avoidances , only carbon removals are truly negative emissions that will help balance our overall carbon budget. At this moment only few carbon removal projects are live and scaling, an emerging marketplace is the privately run puro.earth, which is backed by a Board of Directors consisting of high profile academics and experts
Carbon Offsets - everything you ever wanted to know 