The average Australian produces emissions equivalent to 15 tons of CO2 each year. Naturally, we want to reduce this as much as is practicable — using less electricity, getting rooftop solar, changing our diet, etc. Much of my own work has a focus on decarbonising the energy system.
For the rest of our impact, it’s also natural to explore carbon offsets to try and bring our net impact on the climate to zero. The average cost of an eligible carbon offset in Australia is $25 per ton of CO2. That’s $375 to offset your emissions for a year. Relative to the effort of changing ones’ purchases and behaviour, that’s quite cheap.
But as with the cost to impact ratio of all charities, offsetting emissions follows a Pareto-like distribution (~20% of charities are responsible for ~80% of impact).
A $179AU donation to the Clean Air Task Force is expected to prevent 100 tons of carbon emissions – significantly more effective than most gold-standard offsets, and the same donation to The Good Food Institute is expected to prevent 33 tons, around the same as 20 long haul flights.
Effectively, for a $27 donation each year, one can offset all their emissions.
It’s quite significant that the charity which seems to be the second most effective for offsetting emissions happens to be one of the most impactful places to donate to reduce farmed animal suffering. It’s for this reason that they’re the charity I have donated the most to in dollar terms since 2015. Feed two birds with one scone, as they say.
I hope the takeaway from this is not that there’s no point taking individual actions to reduce one’s emissions, but rather that you can increase your impact further by taking a scientific approach to offsetting your climate impact. And why stop at offsetting only your own impact?
Thanks to Mieux Donner for most of the analysis that informed this post, and Hannah Ritchie of Our World in Data for the data behind the above infographic.