Brentford charity enable you to offset emissions
Brentford-based African Development charity, Excellent Development, has set up branded online donations via Treeduty.com, to enable people to offset their annual carbon emissions by planting endangered trees in Africa.
By answering a quick, light-hearted questionnaire online, people can have their recommended level of offset calculated for them. Alternatively they can select the level of tree planting that they feel best applies to them, around the average of sixteen trees a year for a UK Citizen. Excellent has three levels of donation – Global Warrior at £5 per month; Global Citizen at £8 or Global Consumer at £12 per month.
Simon Maddrell, Excellent Development’s Executive Officer explains, “We wanted to create a fun and accessible carbon offset scheme, which also gave a genuine benefit to communities in Africa. Our scheme not only offsets emissions, but it contributes to mitigating the impacts of climate change in Africa and protecting biodiversity.”
TreeDuty™ donations will enable endangered and medicinal trees to be planted in protected forests in Kenya. These forests act as ‘living seed banks’, providing a source of seeds for endangered tree species to be grown across the region by farmers. The forests will also serve as a centre where local people can learn how to sustainably harvest the tree products to obtain traditional medicines to use or sell, improving health and incomes.
The trees planted absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere helping to mitigate climate change. African communities are set to be hit the hardest by climate change - increased droughts will severely affect farmers’ access to safe drinking water and their ability to grow enough food to live.
Simon adds, “The beauty of our TreeDuty scheme is that we also help to mitigate the impacts of climate change by transforming semi-arid environments through the soil and water conservation benefits of trees. Tree-planting is not the solution to global warming – but for farmers in Africa it can mean the difference between life and death. That’s the real difference that TreeDuty™ can make.”
Excellent Development’s planting of endangered medicinal trees in protected forests for the TreeDuty™ initiative is supported by the expertise of staff from The Royal Botanical Gardens, Kew, as part of the Kenya Seeds for Life project.
February 14, 2007
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