Finger Lakes Climate Fund

Like many people with concerns about climate change, I am in the process of making changes in my own life to reduce my carbon emissions.  But, also like many such people, I am trying to do so while not creating chaos for my family, and limited both by how far along in the process I've gotten, as well as the available technical options.

Two big areas where I can't immediately eliminate emissions are car travel (where we will likely go electric in the next couple of years, but aren't there yet) and air travel (which won't be feasible to eliminate so quickly).  We'll keep working on these items, but in the meantime it's attractive to look at offsetting the emissions rather than doing nothing about them.

I should stress that I don't think there's much virtue in taking no action at all to reduce one's own emissions and then offsetting everything.  But I do think offsets potentially have value as part of an overall sincere strategy to reduce emissions.  However, a central worry is the quality of the offsets: there are lots of horror stories of tree plantations that cause environmental damage, or forests that are planted and then allowed to die, or factories being built in China to produce greenhouse gases just so they could destroy the resulting product and then claim the offset.  Developing countries in general tend to be corrupt and disorganized and it seems likely that offset schemes based there will run into all manner of problems.  So the whole offset area has gotten something of a bad name.

For that reason, when I heard about the Finger Lakes Climate Fund, which promises to offset emissions with local projects in my own region I was very attracted to the idea.  Because the projects are local, and I understand my area, I felt it was likely that I'd be able to assess the quality of the offsets.  The main concern is what is called additionality: are the projects things that genuinely wouldn't have happened if you hadn't ponied up your cash?

In addition, since the fund is run by a small local non-profit, I thought it was likely that I'd be able to get reasonable quality information about how everything is run, and satisfy myself that it was legitimate.  That proved to be correct: the Executive Director, Gay Nicholson, sat down with me for an hour this week and walked me through their process.  This is what I learned.