Your carbon footprint is the direct effect your actions and lifestyle have on the environment in terms of carbon dioxide emissions. Probably the biggest contributors to your footprint are your travel needs, and your electricity demands at home. However, all your actions have a direct or indirect impact, including your diet, and the clothes you wear. We know cars, buses and aeroplanes burn gasoline, public transport may use gasoline and electricity and your home uses a significant portion of your personal electricity needs that generally comes from fossil fuel burning power plants. All these actions contribute to accelerating global warming and climate change.

Why offset?

Everyone has a responsibility to the world we live in now and the world we leave future generations. As Mahatma Gandhi once said “one must care about a world one will not see”.
Reducing our emissions is obviously important in slowing or even reversing climate change — but with world economies booming our carbon emissions are on the rise - Britain’s CO2 levels rose about a quarter of a percent between 2004 and 2005 (BBC, 2006). And as your average person doesn’t wield the power to influence huge companies or governments to change their environmental policies, there needs to be an easier and more effective solution for concerned individuals to take action on a personal level. Given that we all contribute to the problem, we should all contribute to a solution.
Effects of climate change can be seen now, this means we need to ACT NOW.

The role of trees in offsetting your emissions

Trees are green machines that act as natural filters of our air. Through the process of photosynthesis they absorb carbon dioxide (a key GHG and principle contributor to global warming) from the atmosphere and store it in their trunk, branches, leaves, roots, soil and foliage, while releasing oxygen back out.

Whereas deforestation, degradation and poor forest management reduce carbon storage in forests, sustainable management, planting, and rehabilitation of forests can increase carbon sequestration.  In fact the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation states “global carbon retention resulting from reduced deforestation, increased forest regrowth and more agro-forestry and plantations could make up for about 15% of carbon emissions from fossil fuels over the next 50 years (2006).”

Not only are trees an effective means for absorbing and storing the carbon you emit, they have far reaching benefits that extend well beyond that of filtering the air. Sustainably managed forests and urban forestry projects have multiple environmental and socio-economic functions important at the global, national and local scales, and play a vital part in sustainable development. Forests are sources of wood products. They help regulate local and regional rainfall. And forests are crucial sources of food, medicine, clean drinking water, and immense recreational, aesthetic, and spiritual benefits for millions of people.