Carbon offsettingWhich? investigation

Problems with carbon offsetting websites

Look for a carbon offsetting company that publishes full details of its activities

In our investigation, we examined the websites of 13 UK-based carbon offset companies and have a number of concerns about what we found:

• Several of the carbon offsetting sites failed, in our opinion, to give consumers enough information about where the money goes.
• Most of the carbon offsetting sites fail to reveal how much of your donation goes towards administration fees and company profits.
• We found significant variations in how the carbon offsetting sites calculated the amount of carbon dioxide our testers were emitting – even though we fed the same data into each of the websites.
• There were huge price differences between the carbon offsetting sites, with one wanting to charge us around £25 and another almost £160 to offset carbon produced by the same activities.

Best and worse carbon offsetting websites

The companies we felt gave the most relevant and easily accessible information were market-leader Climate Care, Blue Ventures Carbon Offset, PURE and the World Land Trust.

Climate Care in particular gives extensive details of its activities in its annual report, including the proportion of your donation that reaches the carbon offset project they're supporting.

At the other end of the scale, Flying Forest was far too vague, telling visitors to its site that ‘For every £10, Flying Forest will be able to plant a number of trees’.

We could find no information on The Offset Carbon Company’s website about independent verification of its projects. And, unfortunately, as was the case with most of these companies, it didn’t give details of how much of your donation goes to each project.

Cost of carbon offsetting schemes

The price charged to offset a tonne of carbon dioxide varies hugely from one site to another – Carbon Offsets’ scheme costs £7 per tonne, compared with £22.64 per tonne for Carbon Responsible’s most expensive offset project. 

Due to the diverse nature of carbon offsetting schemes, the price of different projects varies enormously. It's very difficult for you to verify that each project really offsets all their emissions and that you're getting best value for money. The cheapest carbon offsetting scheme isn't automatically the best.

Working out your carbon emissions

Confusingly, each online calculator uses a different method to work out your carbon emissions. For instance, when we calculated the annual emissions from a house in west London, the calculated emissions ranged from 1.15 tonnes with Carbon Footprint to 7.1 tonnes with The Carbon Neutral Company.

If you find this as confusing as we did, you might prefer to use the government carbon calculator. This gave a household emissions figure of 4.31 tonnes for our home. Or try the World Wildlife Fund carbon calculator.