Can you really offset your flight emissions?

Traveling near and far can help us appreciate our beautiful world, but as most of us are aware, it also comes with significant costs to our environment. Air travel is extremely carbon-intensive and accounts for roughly 2.5% of global emissions.

With increased passenger awareness of the environmental costs, carbon offset programs have been appearing everywhere, from signage in the airport to an opt-in box when buying your ticket. These offsets are billed as a way for travelers to negate the impact of their flight, but how do these offsets really work? Carbon offset programs usually request a donation towards a carbon sink project such as planting trees, which sequester emissions. However, the specific projects and calculators used are largely unregulated across the $211 million offset market .

While carbon sequestration and decreasing emissions are important, the validity of projects managed by multinational corporations is hard to discern. For example, tree planting projects, if done without significant ecological study, can damage natural biodiversity and emissions reduction programs are nearly impossible to track on a global scale. Even when programs are executed perfectly, the name “offset” is misleading.

The benefits provided are not necessarily proportional to the emissions of flying and they don’t take away the impact of the emissions that have been released into the atmosphere. Although traditional offset programs can be questionable, this doesn’t mean you can�.