Tip –When you have analysed, mitigated and reduced your carbon footprint, offsetting can be a useful way of going that last mile to become carbon neutral.

Carbon offsetting programmes have taken a bit of a bashing in the last few years because their rapid rise to popularity attracted the wrong types of programme and people and poor regulation.

The idea is attractive – let those who are most efficient at carbon reduction get on with it so we can buy carbon offsets from them instead of investing time, effort and resources on carbon reduction ourselves. But carbon offsetting programme have taken a bit of a bashing in the last few years because their rapid rise to popularity attracted the wrong types of programme which didn’t actually deliver lower CO2 emissions and which were poorly regulated. It’s not that all these programmes don’t work, they just all got tarred with the same brush.

The fact is that even using the most modern and refined techniques in analysing your carbon footprint, identifying sources, mitigating and reducing and then continuing to measure and report – you will nearly always be left with some carbon impact that is left. So if you want to be carbon neutral, you have to offset this remaining amount. More on becoming carbon neutral.

There will be ongoing problems with choosing an effective offsetting programme but they are out there. You just need to make sure the programme is certified and credible.

You could always make sure to send out our corporate Christmas ecards instead of paper cards every year and benefit from the carbon offsetting our tree planting does. Over its lifetime, each of the 10 trees we plant with every ecard purchased offsets 1 tonne of CO2.

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