There is a lot of cynicism amongst environmentalists about carbon offsets. If they are for industry, then the cap-and-trade wrangling and backroom deals have often put them off the whole idea. If the carbon offset is for an individual then sometimes we ‘deep greens' can be snide and unpleasant and scoff at someone spending a few pounds, Euros or dollars on offsetting their trip to a Caribbean beach, or when they replace just one incandescent light bulb for a CFL.

Brendan Bowles of the Christian conservation group A Rocha (http://www.arocha.org/ ) says this attitude is unhelpful. "When seasoned campaigners criticize ... they hope to drive people on to do more. But usually it has the opposite effect. It antagonizes, demotivates and paralyses."

Instead Brendan says, we must encourage everyone to begin to take action even if the first step is small.  ‘There are not many people who can completely turn their lives upside-down and reduce their carbon emissions, their electricity consumption, their driving, everything, by 90 per cent...Governments - in the UK, US or anywhere - will only move if they know that the population, the whole population, is behind something. So that is why we have to have everyone "sign up" - enthusiasts, cynics, even the people who don't really care that much - to do a little. Instead of decrying the person who just installs one compact fluorescent light bulb as a tokenist and a hypocrite, we must say "that's fantastic!" - because they are, if you like, taking their first steps on the path of righteousness...'

A Rocha, and Brendan with his wife Jenny and colleague David Hughes, have delivered this paradigm. A Rocha's carbon offset web site - Climate Stewards, http://www.climatestewards.net/  - is helping people do those small offsets that make a difference. How? Well, instead of those worthy but unsexy projects like farm manure digesters and landfill gas projects, everything that is spent on their site goes to plant trees where they are really, really needed  - Africa.

‘With churches that we work with at A Rocha, climate change is seen as an overlap of third world environmental degradation and Creation Care  - and as one of the principal Christians in Conservation groups, they looked to us for guidance.'  So, they linked the desire of A Rocha supporters and others to ‘do something' with a very pertinent need identified by their affiliate in Ghana.

‘We realized that we needed to offer people something that was not "just carbon". Our tree-planting in Ghana not only sequesters carbon, it improves the livelihood of the community - particularly important in rural Africa where the impact of climate change is going to be huge - and because we use native trees, we benefit the local wildlife too...'

So how does this all work?

First, the Climate Stewards web site gives you the calculator to assess what your CO2 footprint is. So, if I am about to take a flight from Philadelphia to San Juan, it tells me that I need to compensate for the 1017 kilograms of carbon dioxide my trip will generate. Given the exact project that they are involved with - tree planting in Ghana - they then use the standard program CO2FIX to take into account the species of tree involved, the conditions, and the lifetime of the project to work out how many trees, and so how much money, is needed to grab that greenhouse gas.

The price is a tad higher than some sites - and I will be reporting in a future blog about the carbon offset price war - because the money is going to help people as well as tackle the CO2.

How?

Well, first, the tree-planting itself generates employment.

Then, quite early on, the roots hold the ground together in the case of flash floods.

Then the trees offer shade from the sun and protection from the wind for the people and for the crops that they plant under and between the trees.

Then, as the trees grow to maturity, they will provide food and building.

Most of the trees are native ones, and then there are some fruit trees thrown in.

Because A Rocha has the people on the ground in AR Ghana, they know that this project is working. There are already twenty small sites in operation, and the Climate Stewards initiative is hoped to be expanded to Kenya, South Africa and Peru. Again, these are countries where reforestation ....and prevention of greenhouse gas production by avoiding de-forestation.......is critical...and places where A Rocha is active.

At a recent meeting of BirdLife International in Ghana (http://www.birdlife.org/news/news/2009/11/west_africa_pa_workshop.html),

the criticism was voiced that ‘Reducing Emission from Deforestation and Degradation (REDD) and carbon finance mechanisms to mitigate climate change are yet to yield any substantial fruits, especially in developing countries in Africa...'. Climate Stewards is aiming to turn that around.