#GreenWingsChallenge – Giving you the chance to carbon offset your flights
Wilsonhalligan is proud to have joined the #GreenWingsChallenge, an initiative launched by Edward Thomas, Director of Gym Marine in early October to help the yachting industry clean up its air travel footprint.
Edward is calling on as many travel-mad colleagues in the yachting industry as possible to take on the challenge. Joining the #GreenWingsChallenge is simple and surprisingly affordable to do! It requires nothing more than looking back through your 2019 diary and listing all the flights taken during the year. With help from Yacht Carbon Offset, a specialised carbon offset service that focuses on Luxury Yacht sector, this flight list is converted into an estimate of the tonnes of greenhouse gases emitted by your air travel and a quote to certify and complete the associated carbon offset. On completion of the offset your profile will be added to the ever-growing list of participants, as has that of Wilson Halligan – we offset 22.3 tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions generated by the team’s 58 flights spanning 46,680 kilometres!
Click here to see who has joined the #GreenWingsChallenge and to join the challenge yourself: #GreenWingsChallenge web page. The goal is to offset 7,688,000 Km – enough to fly to the moon and back 10 times!
How Carbon Offsetting Works
Carbon offsetting supports projects/activities that reduce the Planet’s carbon emissions. These are known as Carbon Emission Reduction Projects (CERPs). Fundamentally, a CERP would not exist without the support of carbon offset payments. Hence, carbon offsetting really helps to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions of our Planet. One of the most common category of CERPs is Renewable Energy Power Plants i.e. electricity production from solar, wind or geothermal power sources. Other categories of CERPs include Energy Efficiency (e.g. cookstove projects) and Carbon Sequestration Projects (e.g. forestry projects).
A project is authorised to sell carbon credits by a recognised International Registry (e.g. Gold Standard, VERRA, UNFCCC), which helps to ensure quality, validation and monitoring. The registry also facilitates sale of the carbon credits. A CERP’s emission reductions are represented by Carbon Credits: 1 tonne of GHG emission reduction/savings = 1 carbon credit.
The process of carbon offsetting is relatively simple. A specified carbon footprint (measured in tonnes of CO2e) is counterbalanced through the purchase and retirement of an equivalent number of carbon credits (measures in tonnes of CO2e) from a CERP. In Wilson Halligan’s case, Yacht Carbon Offset calculated the carbon footprint of the 2019 flights and then purchased and retired 23 carbon credits to counterbalance the carbon impact.
Yacht Carbon Offset has a portfolio of projects that is has selected for to complete the carbon offset for its yachting clients. Its selected project portfolio focuses predominantly on renewable energy projects, such as solar, wind and geothermal technologies, located in regions highly frequented by superyachts e.g. Caribbean or coastal locations. This is due to the immediate emission reduction impact such projects have on the environment, in contrast to carbon sequestration projects (such as tree plantation) that can take a number of years to deliver the benefit. A summary of each project can be seen on Yacht Carbon Offset’s website: www.yachtcarbonoffset.com .
For the #GreenWingsChallenge Yacht Carbon Offset selected the Aruba Wind Farm project to complete majority of offsets. You can see the information on this project on the Gold Standard website. Please click here: https://registry.goldstandard.org/projects/details/1208
In essence carbon offset counterbalances specified greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions by supporting, tonne for tonne, an equivalent reduction of GHG emissions elsewhere.
You can find out more about carbon offsetting by visiting Yacht Carbon Offset’s website: www.yachtcarbonoffset.com