How Can I Track My Carbon Offset?

The traditional model of paying to offset your carbon footprint works like this: An individual or business will purchase carbon offsets (traditionally this is funding projects that remove or reduce greenhouse gas emissions) which in turn, essentially cancels their emissions. But how does one know that their money goes directly to the project and in return offsets their emissions? How can you track your individual carbon offset?

Carbon Footprint Calculators

There are a myriad of calculators out there to track and calculate your personal carbon footprint. Google has no shortage of options for carbon calculators, ranging from simple and moderate, to mind blowingly complicated. But regardless of how detailed you want to get, if you want to identify your carbon footprint, Google will give you plenty of options. 

Sidenote: If you want to keep it simple, you can’t get more simple and easy to understand than our Carbon Calculator.

But what about tracing the next step of your carbon neutral journey? HOW do you track your offsets? 

Whilst identifying and tracking our own individual footprint in a calculator is an important part of our journey, this is usually where the traceability ends. Once you have entered your details into the calculator, you will be given options and choices of how you’d like to pay to offset your carbon footprint. You make a payment and the transaction is done. 

Once you pay, there is usually little by way of tracing the offsets to see how they actually cancel out your individual carbon footprint.

An example of this is when you nominate to offset your carbon emissions when you book a flight. Do you know how that money actually offsets your carbon footprint? No, neither do we. And that to us is the fundamental problem with paying to offset your carbon emissions. It’s not traceable to the average individual. There is no transparency. 

We are not sceptics of the great work these organisations do for the conservation and protection of our planet, there is no question here. But we do believe that part of an individual's journey to becoming more aware and responsible for their own environmental impact is seeing first hand the difference they are making. Truly witnessing and being part of how they neutralise their environmental impact. It’s human nature to be more profoundly affected and more likely to take action if we can physically witness the power of our impact. It’s the cause and effect principle.

This is why Footprint Free is different to traditional Carbon Offsetting programs. We have stripped back the complexity when tracing your footprint and looked at the average results for average Australian users and we put the importance and emphasis around tracing where and how your contribution neutralises your individual environmental footprint.

Every individual who pays their environmental rent through Footprint Free, is allocated their own protected cluster of rainforest that neutralises their footprint. Clusters of trees are valued by their ability to sequester metric tonnes of equivalent carbon dioxide (CO2-e). At Footprint Free, we know the location of every rainforest cluster in our portfolio, allowing us to calculate a unique and highly traceable currency of carbon dioxide sequestration.  It’s not only simple, it’s traceable for an individual (they are given the GPS coordinates). You can see how those protected trees work every day to neutralise your individual environmental impact. 

We want everyone to know that it is their responsibility to pay an environmental rent.  If we don’t start doing it now, what will be left for future generations? Tomorrow is too late. The time to join the movement is now.