How EquiClimate works
Whatever your lifestyle and whatever your means, EquiClimate offers a way to make a focused contribution to tackling climate change:
- through advice on practical changes to your own lifestyle and energy usage
- through offsetting your own carbon emissions – in a unique, effective but straightforward way.
What does it mean to ‘offset’ carbon emissions?
All of us use up a certain amount of fossil-fuel generated energy in our daily lives, through using gas and electricity at home and at work, maybe travelling regularly by car or even by plane, and buying and consuming goods that have used fuel in their production.
Burning fuel inevitably creates carbon dioxide. However careful we may be to regulate our energy usage, we are each creating our own carbon footprint – leaving our mark upon the world’s environment.
To ‘offset’ carbon emissions means to ‘pay back’ the environment in some way for the carbon we’ve generated. An obvious example is planting trees, which absorb carbon dioxide and produce oxygen. But naturally this takes time, and effects are difficult to measure against our own ‘footprint’.
How does EquiClimate do this?
- EquiClimate can help offset the carbon you generate by:
- calculating how much carbon you generate annually through our simple questionnaire
- using the European Union’s Emissions Trading Scheme to buy into the market in carbon allowances, or credits
- buying on your behalf credits equivalent to the amount of carbon you’ve generated (or whatever proportion of that you want to cover)
- ‘retiring’ or withdrawing those credits from the market – which will mean less credits are available to major industries
- uniting the impact of thousands of individuals through the EquiClimate scheme, which will overall significantly reduce the carbon credits available to big polluters.
What is the EU Emissions Trading Scheme?
The EU Greenhouse Gases Emissions Trading Scheme was established in 2005 and is the largest multinational emissions trading scheme in the world, regulating over 10,000 industries in Europe. Together these industries produce more than half of the continent’s carbon dioxide, and 40% of other greenhouse gases. Each of these industries now has to have sufficient carbon allowances to cover their emissions.
The scheme’s overall aim is to use economic incentives to encourage industries to improve their production methods where possible, and to cut pollution.
Big industries, which can’t account for all their emissions with their own capped allowances, have to buy them from other companies who pollute less. Thus the trading scheme:
- benefits financially those companies that emit least greenhouse gases
- gives real incentives to both large and smaller companies to reduce their carbon emissions, and develop alternative production methods where possible
- aims to get overall pollution levels increasingly under control.
Read more about the development of the EU Emissions Trading Scheme, and how it works.
Are there other ways of offsetting?
There are of course different methods of offsetting emissions – such as planting trees, which absorb carbon dioxide and breathe out oxygen – and various other ecology restoration, or ‘carbon abatement’, projects.
Such actions are all valuable, but as a means of personal offsetting they are difficult to quantify – or guarantee. For example, the growth rate for trees (and thus the amount of CO2 they absorb) depends on local conditions and forest management. And there is always the risk that more carbon would be released if the trees were burned or used for combustion. International standards for carbon abatement projects are at an early stage and there are few UN-endorsed projects as yet.
The EquiClimate approach provides a way of protecting the environment from a proportion of CO2 directly equating to the amount you’ve put into it.
Really significant impact on climate change will only be achieved as the nations make a concerted effort to change national patterns of energy usage. But we can all help kickstart the process as we clean up our own act.
And by using the EquiClimate method of buying into the EU’s carbon emissions trading scheme, we harness the power of the market and help to drive it in the right direction to make a substantial difference – with the influence of each individual counting.