Why carbon offsetting and why ESC credits?
Click here to make the purchase
The most effective way to reduce the impact of your ski trip on the global climate is to not fly, and instead to travel by train or other low impact transport. However, if flying is unavoidable, you can mitigate your impact on the climate by buying carbon credits to offset the Green House Gas (GHG) emissions you have created.
Carbon credits are certificates representing the removal of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere or the prevention of emissions somewhere else in the world. They come in many forms, based on the many different ways in which carbon can be captured, and the particular standard that is used to certify them. We buy our carbon credits from the Ar Bolivia project, which is a forestry project in Bolivia, and they are certified to the Gold Standard for carbon offsets, and we sell at cost at £18 per tonne. You can read here how the project conforms to that standard.
Some offsetting standards have come in for some criticism in the past few years, but the credits we sell from the ArBolivia project avoids the common pitfalls of many carbon credit schemes, through the following:
- Gold standard certification.
- Captured carbon in mature trees (not hopeful future capture, or notional prevention of deforestation)
- Benefit to the local community, who are involved in the whole forestry life-cycle.
However, if you would prefer to support an offsetting project that is not based on forestry, the Gold Standard website offers links to other options. If you want to offset a specific flight that is not well covered by the ESC options, we strongly recommend https://www.atmosfair.de/en/.
To emphasise, it is much better to avoid flying in the first place, and to take a train if possible. Carbon credits only offset the GHG emissions from that particular flight, but those emissions are still made. There will be an overall cost to society from them, which require mitigation and adaptation including damage repair and infrastructure investment. The cost is probably best represented by the level of national carbon taxes, for instance Sweden imposes a tax of £120 per tonne (CO2e).
ESC Carbon Credits, from the Cochabamba Project
The Club has bought several hundred tonnes of carbon credits on behalf of the members, from the Cochabamba Project, at a price of £18 per tonne. The Cochabamba Project is a fully trading Industrial Provident Society for the benefit of the community, working in equal partnership with poor smallholders on the fringes of the Bolivian Amazon to establish and maintain a profitable and sustainable community-based forestry enterprise as part of a wider project known as ArBolivia.
The carbon credits represent carbon that has already been captured in trees that the project has planted over the last few years.
Members can use these credits to offset their own carbon emissions by paying the club back for the purchase, exactly at the purchase price.
Before you start on the purchase, you should work out how much carbon credit you want to buy. The easy way is to buy carbon in preset amounts, appropriate to the journey(s) you are offsetting. These are set at notional amounts, based on the average from the latest Eagle tour audit, for each mode of transport. We've rounded these up, to make it easier if one person is buying the offsets for everybody in the tour. This year, these are set at:
Pre-set carbon credit prices
| Nordic Destination | Return air flight and journey | 0.75 tonnes, for | £13:50 |
| Return rail journey | £1:35 | ||
| Alpine Destination | Return air flight and journey | 0.5 tonnes for | £9:00 |
| Return journey, large car | 0.5 tonnes for | £9:00 | |
| Return journey, small car | 0.25 tonnes for | £4:50 | |
| Return rail or coach journey | 0.06 tonnes for | £1:00 |
When you click on the link below, you will be taken to a purchasing form, where you can specify the tour you have undertaken, and the number of carbon credits that you want to purchase for each type of journey.
If, on the other hand, your journey doesn't fit into these simple categories, or if you prefer to calculate your own emissions, use your carbon calculator of choice to work out the amount of carbon credit you wish to buy. Then click on the same link, and specify the number of tonnes of carbon that you wish to purchase.