Offset your personal emissions

Our success is measured in impact, and this is reflected in how we spend your money. 

As an individual U Offset subscriber, 85% of your subscription money (a minimum of 77.5 for business subscriptions) goes directly to funding these planet-saving projects. This includes any transaction fees incurred to get that money where it needs to be. 

The remainder covers everything else – including spreading the word, staff and premises costs, hosting and licenses. Top priority for us is maintaining overheads at just what’s genuinely necessary to maximise impact, with our operational margin standing at just 15% (22.5% for business).

Transparency and trust are core values of ours. They go hand in hand with responsibly putting your money to the best use possible. For those who are interested, you can view our annual Financial Reports.

The projects you’ll be supporting (like reforestation, renewables, efficient cooking stoves) are all ranked highly in terms of climate change solutions.

There are billions of concerned people on this planet who care, but don’t know how to make a meaningful contribution. If we can simply unify those people on one platform to take action together, the strength in our numbers is simply colossal.

We’re not a charity, but a social enterprise. This means we’re not registered as a non-profit, and this is a deliberate strategy to increase the scale of our impact.

With non-profits come financial limitations, and to reach the scale we’re intending, charitable donations and government grants are not enough. If we can reach investors, who often come with financial clout and deep pockets, we can grow very quickly indeed. Only a self-sustaining business model is attractive for that investment.

Otherwise, we operate like a charity, borrowing the best elements that serve our cause and publicly publishing financial information. Our operational margin of just 15% (22.5% for business) is comparable with that of some of the best charities.

For carbon offsets, we publish retirement certificates each quarter which evidence how many tonnes of CO2 have been prevented from going into the atmosphere through our funding. You can view these here.

We only buy carbon credits that meet industry-leading carbon standards – primarily the Gold Standard, but we will also be buying from the Verified Carbon Standard in the future.

Yes. For our tree-planting activities, you can view the associated invoice receipts of purchases from our tree planting partners around the world.

All partners are regularly audited by independent third parties to ensure that the work our community funds is being carried out properly. For example, check out this annual audit for a tree planting project in Madagascar by our partners at Eden Reforestation.

U Offset does not count its tree planting projects towards its calculations of carbon reductions: because newly planted trees are young, they have not reached enough carbon capture potential to be counted as verified tonnes of carbon reductions. Some trees don’t reach overall carbon capture until their 10th year of life, so while tree planting is a necessary investment for the future, it is not a way to reduce emissions now.

For the same reason, all of the credits created by the Woodland Carbon Code (which was launched in 2011 and verifies projects in the UK) are currently Pending Issuance Units (PIUs) until they are mature enough to become Woodland Carbon Units (WCUs) – which are then equivalent to one tonne of carbon removed. Until the trees are this age, they cannot be considered carbon credits of any kind. Once mature however, they will be an example of a nature-based carbon removal credit.

We use the official emissions calculations provided by the World Resources Institute’s Climate Watch platform. You can see how it works at climatedatawatch.org

The first stage for organisations interested in offsetting is to understand your impact, your carbon footprint. There is a big push from government to support and enable organisations to work through, reduce and report their emissions via (SME climate Hub link).

Here at U Offset we work closely with Sustainable Business Services, who work with organisations to provide this as a service, aligned to the United Nations Race to Zero climate change campaign and the SME Climate Hub. You can contact Sustainable Business Services here.