Funding members of EcosystemEvaluation both compensated for their flights with planting local and resilient fruit trees. This mission was aided by TreeDependent, Greendependent‘s initiative of carbon compensation.
Both of us (one more than the other) travel unfortunately substantially due to work (and shamefully, for pleasure, too). Although flying is (or was before the corona virus) part of everyday life now, we felt that only preaching about the importance of carbon compensation and the need to preserve ecosystems are not enough or authentic, and more action is needed. To help us in this mission, we consulted GreenDependent (an amazing association in Hungary dealing with all sorts of challenges from energy poverty to transition economies). Their initiative, TreeDependent works towards a low-carbon, small footprint lifestyle. When certain actions are potentially unavoidable (e.g. flying to a conference in China) the most we can do is to mitigate our impact by compensating. The best way of compensation is probably planting a tree. The cherry on top (literally) is that these are resilient local fruit trees so extra ecosystem services apart from carbon sequestration can be benefitted. Besides, thankfully we don’t personally need to plant over 200 trees – these trees are received by local schools, institutes and non profits, who take care of them. Additionally, we support a horticultural expert specialised on gene preservation of resilient and endemic fruit trees.
In case you’d like to join in reducing your carbon footprint and find out more about TreeDependent, check out their website or contact them on info at greendependent.org or info at treedependent.org.
