Ecologi: Become climate positive

Ecologi

Maker

Happy Earth Day everyone! I'm Elliot one of the cofounders of Offset Earth. We setup this platform for mass funding of real climate action. The capacity of carbon removal projects is so immense, that if we supported even a fraction of them we’d be able to buy ourselves much needed time. Since our launch last year we've planted 1.4 million trees and soon we'll be doing this every month. As a subscriber you'll offset your entire carbon footprint by funding the highest certified carbon reduction projects. You'll be growing your own forest too, each month you'll watch it come to life 12 trees at a time. Today we want to show you the power of collective action. The small individual contributions have the opportunity of major change. If were to scale to the number of Spotify or Netflix subscriptions then you’d be looking at offsetting over a tenth of the entire global carbon footprint and planting 150 billion trees a year. The team behind this are a collective of individuals using their skills to repair the planet. We measure our profit in impact, and are supported by over 60 volunteers on our makers Slack group. Features ✅ Become carbon positive through funding the world’s best climate projects ✅ Grow your own unique forest, between 12 and 48 saplings per month ✅ Set your own low carbon goals and celebrate the ones you've accomplished ✅ Watch your impact and forest come to life on your public profile ✅ Family? Add your kids and pets to your family's profile All for $6.5/€6 per month. We’d love for you to check it out and let us know any questions on here. Cheers all 💚🍃🌱

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5yr ago

chris

This looks really promising, but I’m skeptical of offset projects, generally. There have been a number of things written (https://www.csmonitor.com/Enviro... or https://www.google.com/amp/s/www... for example) showing how the offset industry is largely ineffective and occasionally outright fraudulent. Could you speak to what separates this project from the 75% of ineffective/scammy offset businesses? How are you guaranteeing efficacy? And have you been certified/audited/etc by a charity watchdog of any kind?

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5yr ago

Lucy Jack

Ecologi

Maker

Hey @chrisdolle when we set this up it was imperative that we choose the most effective projects with the highest standards. At the moment we only support those projects with https://www.goldstandard.org/ accreditation (highest certification you can get) and those that support the UN’s Global Goals https://www.globalgoals.org/. We take our transparency very seriously, as trust is a huge deal for us. We post receipts once we’ve purchased the trees and carbon offsets: https://offset.earth/about Our membership revenue is public: https://offsetearth.baremetrics.... We share our roadmap: https://www.notion.so/offseteart... of what’s coming up .. and lastly we publish our board meeting notes.    Happy to answer any questions you might have :)

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5yr ago

Elliot Coad

Ecologi

Maker

Hi @chrisdolle absolutely. Carbon offsets have had one of the rockiest reputations that I can think of. In the first article you shared, most of the answer to your question is here: "In answer to such complaints, some independent organizations – such as the Voluntary Carbon Standard, Plan Vivo, and Gold Standard – offer their seal of approval to projects. Offset providers say nervous customers should look for those certifications." It's these certifications which give projects the project quality. We only work with the highest standard out there, which is Gold Standard, co-created by WWF and 30 other environmental NGOs. They go to lengths (for the right reason) to unequivocally prove that carbon is being removed or prevented from being the atmosphere. The certainty comes from monitoring and reporting by external environmental consultants who have no financial gain from verifying these projects. If the regular audit fails, then the project isn't allowed to issue carbon credits that year. In terms of have we been audited, you can see we don't make any claims directly about climate impage: the carbon credits that we say we'd purchase have their certificates hosted on an international registry, attributed to Offset Earth - so you can see we're keeping to our word. We run a public ledger of all activities, carbon offset certificates, supply chain receipts, board meeting minutes etc: https://docs.google.com/spreadsh.... Genuine full transparency is hugely important, so everything we know you should be able to, too.

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5yr ago

chris

@ecoad thanks! Great to see the transparency, as that’s incredibly important, and it’s fantastic to see you working with gold standard projects. Given the state of the offset industry, this is a breath of fresh air (no pun intended). Thank you (and Lucy) for the responses. Great stuff.

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5yr ago

Elliot Coad

Ecologi

Maker

@chrisdolle Brilliant, cheers Chris.

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5yr ago