Saturday, January 23, 2010

Things To Consider Before Purchasing Carbon Offset

By Jennifer Bennett

With growing awareness of the dangers of global warming, instruments like carbon credits and carbon offset are becoming more and more popular with individuals and businesses as a successful means to safeguard our environment.

If you want to nullify the adverse impact of your activities on nature, then you can purchase an amount of carbon offset, which is equal to your carbon footprint. Your purchase of a carbon offset helps finance environment friendly projects such as power generation units using wind farms and tidal energy.

Before purchasing a carbon offset, it will be a prudent idea to recognize what causes the release of greenhouse gases in your everyday life. Among our daily actions that result in carbon emissions, the most important are driving, travelling by air and making use of home appliances that cause high electricity consumption.

Once you have listed out these activities, you must plan to get rid of some of them and reduce some as far as possible. Doing this would enable you to greatly lessen your role in degrading the environment. For example, you can lower emissions by driving less, using fluorescent lights, and fitting better insulation to reduce energy consumption on heating or cooling.

After you have taken into account all the aspects where you can make changes, you must get down to calculating your carbon footprint, which will be the entire amount of emissions arising from all your remaining actions. The method of calculating this footprint changes from one action to another, but there are a lot of online calculators which can help you in the matter.

Carbon offset providers counterbalance carbon emission from your actions by lowering emissions in any part of the globe through your buying of offset. You can invest in one of the environment friendly projects offered by the offset providers, and each initiative has its own method of emission reduction. But you must be careful before investing in a project. You must not invest in projects with dubious credentials as that might ultimately result in wastage of your funds. Projects that have passed quality tests conducted by authentic certifying bureaus are the most suitable ones to invest in, as they bear the seal of approval and can be trusted.

Lastly, you must collect as much knowledge as possible on the subject. Through research, you will come to know the genuine offset providers and the types of projects that are suitable for investment, and you can also closely track how the scheme you have invested in is performing.

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