Offset your emissions with a few clicks on new 'Climate Neutral' website

T

o avoid the worst effects of climate change, science tells us we must limit global temperature rise to less than 2 degrees Celsius.

To keep our communities healthy and safe we need a climate neutral world. This is achievable but will require action from ALL of us. YOU can take action now by measuring, reducing and offsetting.

Even with our best efforts to reduce, our daily activities and business operations will result in unavoidable emissions. This is why offsetting, after measuring and reducing, is key for achieving a climate neutral world. Offsetting benefits the whole planet, not just the country in which the emissions are reduced.

Check-out this new United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change website - “Go Climate Neutral Now.”

'It's getting hotter', The Economist warns

S

AVING the planet is now a matter of a few clicks—at least on a small scale.

On September 22nd the UN’s Climate Change Secretariat launched Climate Neutral Now, a website that estimates an individual’s carbon footprint based on whereabouts, recycling habits, energy use and so on.

Offsetting any resulting guilt is easy: the site takes donations to fund clean development projects. Your correspondent paid $24 to a facility capturing methane from pig dung to cover the carbon-dioxide emissions she had caused during the past year.

The initiative is one of many intended to spur action on greenhouse-gas emissions in the run-up to climate talks in Paris at the end of the year. Some seem quite successful: in recent weeks around 2,000 individuals and 400 organisations have committed to stop investing in firms that produce fossil fuels.

More important, countries have responded to a shift in climate-change policy after the failure of negotiations in Copenhagen in 2009: rather than trying to agree on mandatory emissions reductions, they were asked to say by October 1st what they were willing to do.

ReadThe Economist story - “It’s getting hotter”.