Carbon Offsetting and "Walking our Talk"

An inherent challenge in study abroad is the environmental impact of international travel. For example, a round-trip flight from Boston to London produces over a ton of carbon dioxide - per person! Carbon dioxide is a major contributor to the Greenhouse Effect, which is warming the Earth's climate and is quite possibly the greatest environmental threat of the 21st century.

 

Given Living Routes' commitment to sustainability, we are very concerned about these impacts and, in 2005, instituted a Carbon Offset Program in order to address this issue.

 

Carbon Offsetting is a voluntary market mechanism that encourages reductions in greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. There are basically three steps to any Carbon Offsetting initiative:

1. Creating an inventory of GHG emissions,

2. Reducing these emissions where possible, and

3. Offsetting any remaining emissions

1. Inventory Emissions

The first step is to inventory one's GHG emissions. In order to do this, it is important to be clear about the boundaries of the inventory. This means both the "organizational boundary" - that is, what facilities and spaces of the organization will be included; and the "operational boundary" - waht are the primary generators that you will measure.

 

At Living Routes, we have defined our organizational boundary as our office in Amherst and the program sites, at least to the degree that we are involved with them. Our operational boundary for the 2005 fiscal year included our electricity use, reimbursable car travel, and flights for our staff, faculty, and students.

 

These were relatively easy to measure. We got out our electric bills and calculated that we used around 8600 kilowatt hours over the year. Multiplying this by a coefficient available through the Working 9 to 5 on Climate Change guide, we found that this was equivalent to 3.5 metric tons of CO2. A similar calculation for car travel shows we drove about 6700 miles and emitted around 2.4 mT of CO2.

 

Then comes air travel.... Our staff and faculty collectively flew about 143,000 miles, which resulted in 47.6 mT of CO2. And our students together flew close to a million miles - that's like two round trips to the moon! - and generated 165 mT of CO2. That's like 25 elephants worth of CO2! This all adds up to a total of around 218 mT.

 

In FY06, we are also including in our inventory: staff commuting, taxi, bus and train travel, paper use, and ground transportation on the programs. So we are effectively expanding our operational boundary.

 

We should also mention there are also things we are not accounting, such as emissions from our furniture and carpeting; methane from the little compost we generate; shipping and courier services; and our computers and printers. There will always be emissions outside of one's operational boundary, but the idea is to capture as much as you feasibly can.

 

2. Reduce Emissions

 

Once you have inventoried your emissions the next step is to reduce emissions wherever possible. It is important to emphasize that Carbon Offsetting is only a second best solution. Without reductions, Carbon Offsetting is little more than greenwashing.

 

Living Routes is doing pretty well here. Some things we currently do include:

1. Using recycled paper

2. Recycling as much as possible (even packing peanuts)

3. Purchasing locally when possible

4. Printing on both sides of paper

5. Using compact fluorescent lightbulbs

6. Using non-toxic cleaners

7. Phasing out CRT monitors in favor of more energy-efficient LCD monitors

8. Using electronic vs. paper communications when possible (for example, we send out program handbooks as PDFs rather than hardcopies)

9. And encouraging carpooling and telecommuting

Places we feel we could do better include:

1. Utilizing tele- and videoconferencing in lieu of travel, and

2. Offering incentives for staff travel.

3. Offset Remaining Emissions

 

Even after reducing as much as possible, there will still be remaining emissions as we all live and work in the real world. It is still possible to become "Carbon-neutral," however, by supporting and/or purchasing Carbon Offsets. These offsets are commonly called "Green Tags" or "Renewable Energy Certificates" (a.k.a. RECs). A Green Tag is a tradable commodity that represents the contractual rights to claim the environmental benefit or attribute of a given project. So, for example, a wind farm might sell their electricity to the grid and also sell their Green Tags, which in this case would represent the reductions in CO2 emissions that result from delivering wind power to the grid.

 

There are tens of millions of dollars in Green Tags under contract today with organizations as diverse as the UN, World Cup Soccer, Mazda, the Dave Matthews Band, and an increasing number of college campuses.

 

The bottom line is that Green Tags help channel money towards a variety of important projects including:

1. Increasing energy efficiency in buildings, factories, or transportation;

2. Generating electricity from renewables such as wind, solar, geothermal, small hydro, and biomass;

3. Switching to fuels that produce less pollutants - for example, switching from cooking with wood to using solar cookers;

4. Putting wasted energy to work via cogeneration; and

5. Sequestering CO2 in forests.

There are a growing number of companies selling Green Tags and there are a number of things to look for in assuring their quality. The two most important criteria are:

1. That the results are rigorously quantified using a baseline analysis. Without this, you really don't know what you are buying; and

2. What is called "additionality," which is proof that this project would not have otherwise occurred if not for the funding provided by selling Green Tags.

In addition,

1. Projects should be certified by an independent third-party (respected certifiers include Green-e for domestic projects and CDM Gold Standard for international projects);

2. You should be able to find out what percentage of funds actually go to the projects;

3. The companies should provide educational materials, online calculators and other support for their clients; and

4. They should not only compensate emissions, but also bring tangible benefits to the local population.

Living Routes is currently offsetting its emissions using two methods. The first is through solar ovens. For example, we have offset approximately 40 mT of CO2 from our January and Spring '07 programs in Senegal as well as 53.3 mT from our FY06 office emissions by purchasing and distributing 11 solar ovens to selected villages that are part of the Senegal ecovillage network.

 

The second method we are using to offset our emissions is through planting trees - ideally by students within the particular ecovillages. In these cases, we have used calculations created by an organization called Trees for Life (based at the Findhorn Foundation in Scotland) to estimate the number of trees required.

 

It is important to acknowledge that tree planting is a bit controversial in the Carbon Offset world. On the negative side,

1. A forest is never permanent and may one day release the sequestered carbon back into the atmosphere;

2. Sequestering carbon is not the same as avoiding or reducing emissions and does little to address our dependence on fossil fuels;

3. There are technical challenges associated with figuring out exactly how much carbon particular trees sequester; and

4. The Kyoto Protocol unwisely allows monocultured and genetically modified plantations to qualify as "sink" projects so there is often a negative perception of tree planting projects and one needs to prove that their projects are more sustainable.

However, at least for our purposes, we feel the pros outweigh the cons:

1. Students can get directly involved, which has strong educational value;

2. Tree planting is ultimately scalable, so one person can do it or a large group. And "additionality" is easy to prove;

3. There are clear social and ecological benefits through protecting biodiversity, water quality, enhancing public recreational areas, etc.

In conclusion, we believe carbon offsetting is a natural fit with study abroad and, while Living Routes is proud - to our knowledge - to become the first study abroad organization to fully institute a Carbon Offsetting program, I believe that many more will begin doing so in order to:

• Better educate and empower students around their environmental impact

• Support the transition to a sustainable energy economy

• Support local ecosystems (and economies!) within the host countries

• Potentially reduce costs through energy saving initiatives

• Demonstrate leadership around climate change, and

• Ultimately help make our planet safe and healthy for future generations.

 

For more information, please check out the links on our Resources page and feel free to call or email us with questions. Thank you.