By Sharmin Ahammad
It’s a seductive idea. You pay a few extra pounds each time you fly, and the money is invested in carbon-reduction initiatives, such as tree planting, in order to neutralise the emissions that your flight has produced.
After years of shying away from the prickly issue of climate change, airlines have grabbed the olive branch of carbon offsetting. But offsetting is controversial - and flawed. It allows their passengers to keep flying while at the same time seeming to do something about it. In October 2009, responsibletravel.com, one of the first travel companies to endorse carbon offsetting, scrapped it, saying that "reduction targets will not be met this way".
Of course, some flights are necessary and unavoidable. So if you need to fly, is the idea of offsetting the flight by investing in future positive environmental actions a worthwhile one?
Two problems with offsetting
This is the first problem. The positive actions, such as planting trees and changing lightbulbs, happen in the future, and the carbon saved happens even further into the future. It can take 60 years or more for planted trees to recover the carbon caused by your flight.
Climate scientists agree that we face the danger of a global warming tipping point where temperature rises trigger further rises in a vicious circle. This is estimated to take place in a decade, leaving us in 2009 a 10-year window in which to slash carbon emissions.
Because of the danger of runaway warming, carbon cuts made today (by not flying, for example) are more valuable than cuts made in the future (by investing in tree planting). The trouble is, most offset schemes don’t take this into account. If they did, they would be prohibitively expensive.
There is a second problem with offsetting. For offset schemes to have any value at all, they have to be causing positive actions that wouldn’t have happened without their intervention. For example, an offset scheme donates some money to help a school buy energy efficient lightbulbs. The school was planning to buy the bulbs anyway, but now it uses the money for something else.
How much money is lost along the way?
There are no universal standards against which to measure the success of carbon offsetting and their individual projects. The cost of offsets for the same flights vary from company to company, and according to Jutta Kill, from Forests and the European Union Resource Network (FERN), “more than half” of carbon offsetting profits are spent on administration and research.
Since 1997, there have been fewer inspections of carbon offsetting schemes and only a handful of businesses comply with government guidelines.
Optimal conditions are also necessary for the schemes to work. For a tree-planting scheme to offset the amount of carbon produced by a flight, every tree planted must receive the optimum amount of nutrients and water for it to grow healthily. In reality, many trees in conservations die prematurely, releasing carbon into the air early as they decay and even increasing CO2 in the atmosphere.
Offsetting companies make big profits
The majority of carbon offsetting schemes are businesses, not charities. And offset schemes can be highly profitable, as suggested by JP Morgan’s buyout of carbon offset company Climate Care. Prior to the takeover in 2008, Climate Care was making gross profits of £2,013,611 a year. In September 2009, JP Morgan reportedly bid $123million for Eco-Securities, an offsetting and carbon management company.
As Jutta Kill points out, it would be more effective and efficient to donate money directly to climate change charities instead of to an offsetting company.
Undoubtedly, there are some positive effects to come from money invested in offsetting, and some schemes are better than others. But on balance, the only really effective action is to avoid producing the emissions in the first place. Carbon offsetting is not a silver bullet that will prevent climate change.