The carbon offset of our plane trips
In Morocco, we met Mohamed, Irène and their children and discovered their organic farm Saytlia. (If you missed them, here are the article and the video report that we have made on their beautiful vision and realisation.) A few months later, in India, Damien spent a week with Devinder and Brij Bala and worked in their farm, also organic, DevBala Farm. (If you missed it, here is the article about this WWOOFing week.)
We shared with you these two beautiful initiatives and, thanks to your donations (remember, we decided to keep 20% of them for this purpose), we were also able to help them financially. But eventually they are the only ones that we have met and supported, and when we got off our bikes in September, we still had a good share of these 20%…
So we first decided to offset the carbon emissions related to our plane trips.
The various calculators that we have tried agreed on the same verdict: the sum of our flight-related carbon emissions amounted to 16.5 tonnes of CO2 equivalent. The figure did not mean much to us, so we looked deeper into the subject… Apparently, in order to avoid major climatic disturbances on the planet, the sustainable emission level is about 2 tons per person, per year. Waw! It seems that we have slightly exceeded the quota during our year of travels. Imagine, our Madrid-Buenos Aires journey alone made us reach this limit!
So we have trusted the CO2 Solidaire program (backed by the association GERES) and financed the offset of the 16.5 tonnes of CO2 equivalent which we were responsible for: here is the certificate of compensation*
Our financial contribution will be sent to their project in Cambodia to spread improved cooking stoves, which consume 30% less timber and do not pollute the indoor atmosphere of the houses.
That said and that done, there were still a few sleepy euros eager to wake up. That is why we are now looking for projects aiming towards a sustainable agriculture and requiring a little help to come to life or to develop.
If indeed you have ideas or contacts to offer us, we’re all ears!
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