Voluntary Carbon Offsetting: The New Black?

Having a look back, it has occurred to me I have been fairly critical of studies that have been unable to propose solutions to the many travel related problems they have highlighted. Perhaps this has been a little unfair, as if this blog has taught me one thing so far it’s that the impacts of transportation on our environment are truly global, and if reasonable strategies are going to be suggested to mediate issues, they require the input of not only expert actors, but also the general public (the ones that actually use the transport).

Owing to the clear difficulty therefore in implementing any sort of viable solution to the increasing carbon emissions, I was encouraged recently when I came across an article about the growth of voluntary carbon offset schemes by Gossling et. al (2007).

While is easy to plot a graph depicting the rapid growth of air travel since the mid-1970s, it is also possible to construct one showing an equally rapid expansion in the number of voluntary offset schemes in the last 10 years focussing primarily on aviation emissions, and at present there are 41 schemes that help to offset 200,000 tonnes of CO₂ each year.

While these figures helped to generate hope in my mind for offset markets, Gossling’s work is well balanced and he soon went on to explore the credibility and efficiency of these schemes. This duly crushed my burgeoning optimism, as it is shown current offsets are negligible in comparison to the 515 mega tonnes of CO₂ that are produced each year by the aviation industry, and in fact offsets would need to increase by a factor of 400 to become relevant.

Voluntary offsetting schemes therefore remain an ambiguous solution to aviation’s environmental impact, and although in principal they have the potential to evoke positive global environmental changes, we will not be balancing the scales for a long time yet.