A practical guide to carbon offsetting through tree planting
From Zappi.io, a tech scale-up dealing in market research.
We’re pretty invested in making Zappi’s impact uniformly positive; I can’t keep track of the number of programs that our excellent “Head of People” — Tom Holliss — has undertaken, but they span from Camden-focussed (clothing-collection for homeless people in winter, bringing elderly local residents who’ve been left behind by the rapid gentrification into the office to see what ‘tech’ is all about, outreach and mentorship with local schools), to industry-focussed (a number of developers are involved in organisations like BlackCodher that seek to help re-balance some of the systemic inequities in tech), to global and organisation-wide (re-incorporating Zappi as a B Corp, offsetting CO2 emissions).
There’s also a wealth of reasons why you, a good capitalist with concern only for your profits, should care about this. Whilst this is an area that a large handful of people are truly passionate about, we’re also well aware that a rock-solid environmental position helps attract talent, reduce employee churn, increase satisfaction and purpose, and help people truly buy into the company. We reckon that particularly amongst the younger cohort who’ll be entering the industry over the next few years, this stuff will be non-negotiable. To put it in context, missing a few exceptional hires would likely cost us far more in missed opportunity than the cost of offsetting the entire businesses emissions.
In 2019, a YouGov study of over 9000 consumers found that they were 67% more likely to choose a product or service from a business that is taking action on climate change and the environment.
In 2020, a Nielsen study also found 66% of all consumers are willing to pay more for sustainable brands. This figure is even higher for millennials (73%) and Gen Z (72%).
As a software company in largely leased (newly fitted) premises, used to using Zoom over business trips, inner-city public-transport commuting over lengthy drives, and all things tech and cloud over paper, produce, and on-premise servers, our emissions are pretty low. Whilst certifying ourselves for B Corp status, we discover that our Scope 1 emissions are zero, with Scope 2 only making up 4.5% of Zappi’s total emissions of somewhere under 400 tonnes CO2e. With that figure (made up largely of air-travel and server costs) in mind, we set about searching for the most high-impact way of making a difference.
There are some brilliant articles going around that lay out the most important factors for considering a “good” tree-planting offsetting scheme. I’ll leave you with a great link from Kew Gardens in London to dig deeper, but in short, try and tick the following;
- Protect existing forest over planting new forest
- Work with locals
- Maximise biodiversity, avoid monocultures
- Make your land choice carefully
- Natural regeneration is easier than tree planting
- Choose tree species to prioritise biodiversity
- Choose trees that are resilient to climate change
- Plan forwards
- Learn by doing
- Make it pay; think about income streams to make it self-sustaining
Choosing a tree-planter
In our experience, the biggest single factor is transparency; in fact, I’d go as far as saying it’s honesty. We entertained more than a few conversations that really, really, looked good, until you got under the skin; at which point, you realised that you would actually be investing in a mono-culture — palm-oil in Indonesia, pine-trees in Madagascar, and others.
Eventually, we settled on Reforest’action (no affiliation, but I do recommend them, and we have spent a fair bit of money with them over the past few years). Their transparency was great, they endeavour to hit almost all of the aforementioned sustainable development goals, and they’ve got a pleasing interface!
We’ve supported tree-planting projects in the following places (roughly ordered by number of trees at time of writing):
- Piura, Peru
- Kuzuko, South Africa
- Stansted Forest, UK
- Brix, France
- Nariño, Colomia
- Palizada, Mexico
- Rondônia, Brazil
Our Zappi-Reforest’action dashboard is here:
How much CO2, how many trees?
Option 1: pay money, use a CO2 calculator or a consultant, and get a figure that you can rely upon.
Option 2: start from first principles, work out your CO2 emissions, round them up to make sure you’re not being too easy on yourself, check the figures, double check them, and you’re done.
Given the skills of our team, we opted for option 2. This included things like looking up great-circle distances between cities and average fuel-efficiency-per-passenger-mile of passenger planes, surveying the employees to determine commute habits, and estimating the power used by our cloud-server providers.
Our scope 1, 2, & 3 CO2 emissions came to somewhere under 500 tonnes. You can read more about our commitment to becoming a carbon neutral company here.
For a tree planted in appropriate conditions, in a not-permanently-frozen country, with a safety-factor included in case of death, and some more safety factors to cover other eventualities, a common approximation is 7 trees per tonne of CO2. Note that the species, the location, the quality of care, the risk of natural disasters, and other factors significantly impact this calculation.
What next?
Go ahead and choose your tree planter, purchase the trees, then work out how you can do more!
