Tropical reforestation voucher (Carbon Offsetting Project)


Your expedition flight produces 1.50 tonnes of Co2
(£15 of tropical reforestation vouchers)

Your annual household footprint can be around 20.00 tonnes of Co2
(£150 of tropical reforestation vouchers)

For more information please see the description below



If you would like to pay for more than £100 worth in Carbon offset, you can do this by increasing the quantity. For example, £300 worth would be selecting £100 and increasing the quantity to 3.
For a specific amount, each amount will need to be added the basket. For example, £115 would be a £100 amount added to the basket, then a £15 amount added to the basket.

Offsetting your flights

The airline industry contributes 2% of carbon emissions annually amounting to a total of 895 million tonnes in 2018. The Wallacea Trust is supporting the campaign for flight prices to be increased by $10 per tonne of carbon emitted for each passenger. This would add around $17 on the costs of a return trip from London to New York using an online carbon calculator.

How could the funds raised in this way be used to offset carbon emissions from flights? A study published in Science showed that there were 0.9 billion hectares mainly in the Tropics that are currently without trees but are suitable for reforestation (e.g. it is not currently urban or agricultural land). Reforesting the entire 0.9 billion hectares could store 205 gigatons of carbon, and the estimated additional carbon added to the atmosphere since the start of the industrial revolution is only 305 gigatons! In other words, planting up this area with trillions of trees would start reversing the effects of climate change.

Unfortunately, the authors didn’t go onto identify how such mass plantations could be achieved or how much it would cost. The sister organisation of Opwall, the Wallacea Trust is running a pilot reforestation project on Buton island, SE Sulawesi, Indonesia to see how this could be achieved at an affordable cost. Here poor rural farmers are being paid to plant saplings of mixed species of rainforest species, found in an adjacent natural rainforest, on their land. The payments to the farmers though are repeated year after year for 20 years if the planted trees are maintained, by which time some of the faster growing species are mature. The farmers who own the forest on their land are then able to harvest 5% of the trees in any one year on the conditions that the end use for the wood is something which doesn’t release the carbon (eg house construction, furniture etc) and that they replace the harvested trees with new native rainforest tree saplings. If they abide by these conditions, then the annual payments from the carbon offset scheme continue.

If the aviation industry wants to offset the impact of their activities, then they would need to reforest 18 million ha of the identified 0.9 billion ha. A $10 per tonne carbon charge would raise $8.95 billion per annum which would mean around $497 per hectare per year could be paid for the reforestation. The Wallacea Trust project in Buton if successful would be a blueprint on how reforestation of native rainforest can be achieved for this cost. Such a scheme would not just help lock up carbon and provide habitat for threatened species, but would also be a significant income transfer from wealthy nations to poor rural farmers in the Tropics.

If you want to help with this project then you can offset your carbon impacts at a cost of $10 per tonne by buying a £15 tropical reforestation voucher that will be donated to the Wallacea Trust to help with the Buton pilot reforestation scheme. 50 tonnes of carbon offset will support 1ha of tropical forest regeneration and maintenance each year.


Additional information

