Plant more trees

These days, I’m much more aware that flying somewhere is adding to the climate problem, but things are currently set up so that flying is often hard to avoid. So although not flying at all is the best policy, for now, it’s going to have to be a mitigated choice, where the carbon miles generated get ‘paid back’ through planting enough trees to remove that amount of carbon from the atmosphere.

Greenpop is a Cape Town NPO that’s working to “restore ecosystems and empower environmental stewards through reforestation, urban greening, sustainable development, and environmental art projects across Sub- Saharan Africa”, and they’ll plant trees on your behalf, at a donation of R120 per tree.

We contacted them to find out how to calculate our carbon miles in 2019, and they gave a simple formula of 2 trees per short-haul flight, and 8-10 trees for cross-continental flights. With a couple of trips to Durban, Joburg. New York and Porto under our belts this year, we calculated we owe 32 trees, so that’s what we’ve paid Greenpop to plant on our behalf.

Want to do something similar? Find out more at Greenpop.org.