CarbonFREE
Eastleigh Borough Council has set up CarbonFREE – the Carbon Fund for Reducing Emissions in Eastleigh.
CarbonFREE is a fund that local people, community organisations and businesses can invest in to offset CO2 emissions. The Council are also investing in this fund to help them meet their target to go Carbon Neutral by July 2012. The money from this fund will be invested in local sustainable energy projects.
The main focus of the council’s goal to go carbon neutral is to reduce CO2 emissions. However, some emissions are difficult, if not impossible, to avoid. These emissions are an obstacle for the council and local communities if they want to go carbon neutral. The Council sees offsetting as a means to get even closer to this goal.
Given the controversy that currently surrounds offsetting, the challenge has been to create an offset fund that is genuine and effective and one into which the local community will be comfortable investing.
As part of its campaign to go Carbon Neutral by 2012 the Council produced a Carbon Compensation Policy Paper. The Paper outlines the main carbon compensation issues for the council in trying to achieve carbon neutrality and makes recommendations to influence further work.
Many of these recommendations have been incorporated into CarbonFREE. The money from the fund will be invested in local sustainable energy projects in homes and community buildings. Energy efficiency projects are favoured by the Council as they have a lower cost per tonne of carbon saved compared to renewable energy technologies. CarbonFREE will have a clear audit trail - no double counting or investment in projects with dubious long term management, like tree planting half way across the world. Eastleigh Borough Council emphasise that this is an offset/compensation fund that can be trusted.
CarbonFREE has just started up and is advertised on the Council’s website. The Council has made an initial investment of £50,000. A CarbonFREE annual report will be sent to those who invest in the fund. The first report will be in Autumn 2009. The report will show what projects have been funded, give an insight into what difference they made to local people and the total amount invested by the council and the local community into CarbonFREE.
Contact Email:
Organisation:
Eastleigh Borough Council
Status:
In progress
Keywords relating to this case study:
Eastleigh, offset, carbon emissions, carbon neutral
South East groups case study relates to:
Emissions monitoring
