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Offsetting Carbon Emissions with CAUSE Canada

1) What is carbon offsetting?
2) What is CAUSE Canada’s carbon offset strategy?
3) Why is CAUSE Canada selling carbon offsets?
4) How does CAUSE Canada offset carbon?

What is carbon offsetting?
As we work to minimize our greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, carbon offsetting is offered as a means of compensating for those emissions that we are so far unable to cut. The premise is simple: the consumer calculates his or her GHG emissions and donates enough money to reduce, avoid, or sequester an equal volume of GHG elsewhere. The outcome is that the consumer’s combined activities are “carbon-neutral,” not contributing to overall increases in GHG in the atmosphere. Carbon credit vendors usually offer offsets for specific activities like flying, driving, and electricity consumption, in addition to cumulative emissions from the sum of one’s activities.

Carbon offsets are an imperfect means of addressing climate change and environmental degradation. It is essential that we make changes in our own lives to minimize our environmental impact. But we also realize that it isn’t always feasible to stop producing GHGs. That’s where carbon offsetting comes in.

What is CAUSE Canada’s carbon offset strategy?
CAUSE Canada has a long-term carbon offset plan. We are now selling carbon offsets that will expand our reforestation programming in Guatemala sufficiently to offset the amount of carbon you are seeking to offset.

Initially, 84% of our carbon offset revenue will be invested directly into reforestation in Guatemala. The remaining 16% will cover all offset-related administrative costs, with a substantial portion saved in a designated account. As this account accumulates it will provide the start-up for our more capital-intensive carbon offset programs, including landfill gas utilization and plastic recycling.

Rest assured, your carbon offset purchase will result in an equivalent amount of greenhouse gas being reduced, avoided, or sequestered. In addition, your purchase will form part of the foundation for other ambitious offset programs. In the extremely unlikely event that these other offset programs are delayed for too long, the amount set aside for them will be invested in reforestation to ensure that the full value of your carbon offset purchase is realized.

All carbon offset revenue will be invested in overseas offsetting programs. CAUSE Canada’s Canadian strategies are designed to minimize the GHGs emitted by our office, staff, and donors in order to maximize the positive impact of our international programs.

Why is CAUSE Canada selling carbon offsets?
Climate change is one of the great social issues of our time. It is also a matter of justice. Environmental degradation is never simply a question of “things out there.” People are dependent on natural processes, plants and animals for our survival, and the more direct one’s relationship with these processes – as agriculturalists, foresters, hunters, and others – the more vulnerable one is to shocks in these systems.

Rather than simply a warming process, climate change promises greater extremes in weather. Extremes – whether hot, cold, wet or dry – are bad for crops. The threat of disrupted food production is greatest for the 1.4 billion people who live on less than $1.25 per day, those who do not have the income to purchase food grown elsewhere. More than 53% of Sierra Leone, almost 20% of Honduras, and 11% of Guatemala is included in those 1.4 billion. The ramifications of food insecurity are interminable and cyclical, including malnutrition and disease, lost work and education opportunities, and civil conflict.

According to the UN High Commission for Refugees, as many as 50 million people classify as environmental refugees – people who have been forced from their homelands as a direct result of environmental collapse. That’s more refugees than are caused by war and political oppression combined. Environmental crisis is not a fringe issue, a fad, or a hypothetical for the future: it is now, and it is a matter of life and death.

As crops fail, so too do forests, especially where forests are in the process of reclamation and re-growth. It is nearly impossible to reforest a hillside that has been eroded by record rains or dried solid by droughts. In Central America, 40% of the rainforests have been cleared or burned in the last 40 years, mostly to graze beef cattle for export to North America.

Climate change also promises more hurricanes of greater strength. In 1998, Hurricane Mitch killed as many as 14,000 people in Honduras alone. In 2005, Hurricane Stan killed 650 people and destroyed 35,000 homes in Guatemala, in large part because of subsequent landslides on eroded slopes.

Climate change impacts human lives immediately and dramatically, and the majority of this impact is felt in the global South, by people who do not enjoy the buffer of a powerful position in the global market. Yet, GHG emissions predominantly come from the wealthy North.

GHG emissions are enormously uneven from country to country, and from region to region. For example, Canada’s overall GHG emissions per capita is around 21 tons of C02 equivalent per year, while the average Albertan more than triples that, at nearly 70 tons annually. In contrast, the per capita average in Honduras is 1 ton, in Guatemala it is 0.9 tons, and in Sierra Leone – one of the lowest emissions countries – it is 0.2 tons. That means the average Albertan emits as much GHG as 350 Sierra Leoneans!

The wealthy hold disproportionate responsibility for human-influenced climate change, while the poor suffer disproportionately from its effects. Climate change is a global justice issue.