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Ross Taylor says "Some people and organisations offset their entire carbon footprint while others aim to neutralise the impact of a specific activity, such as taking a flight. To do this, the holidaymaker or business person visits an offset website, uses the online tools to calculate the emissions of their trip, and then pays the offset company to reduce emissions elsewhere in the world by the same amount – thus making the flight “carbon neutral”.
Many people are confused by the low prices of carbon offsets. If it’s so bad for the environment to fly, can a few pounds really be enough to counteract the impact? The answer is that, at present, there are all kinds of ways to reduce emissions very inexpensively. After all, a single low-energy lightbulb, available for just £1 or so, can over the space of six years save 250kg of CO2 – equivalent to a short flight.
That’s not to say that offsetting is necessarily valid, or that plugging in low-energy lightbulb makes up for flying. The point is simply that the world is full of inexpensive ways to reduce emissions. In theory, if enough people started offsetting, or if governments started acting seriously to tackle global warming, then the price of offsets would gradually rise, as the low-hanging fruit of emissions savings – the easiest and cheapest “quick wins” – would get used up.
In the fens of Eastern England a volume equivalent to 1,800 Olympic swimming pools of peat is lost each year due to arable farming, generating well over 100,000 tonnes of CO2 each year.
Conservation managed lowland fens appear to be among the most effective carbon sinks per unit area in England and Wales
By restoring peatland at the Great Fen we are trapping greenhouse gases and providing natural flood defences.