Carbon Offsets To Alleviate Poverty (COTAP) empowers individuals and businesses to fight deforestation, climate change, and global poverty. COTAP counteracts your carbon emissions through certified carbon projects which restore and protect forests while also creating life-changing income for people living on less than $2 per day.
How COTAP’s Deforestation Solution Also Alleviates Poverty
COTAP pools purchases of carbon credits by individuals and businesses to support certified projects which make payments to farmers in least developed regions for protecting, planting, and maintaining trees on their own land. All COTAP projects are certified by Plan Vivo, the longest-standing forestry carbon standard in the world, and the only standard which requires that projects have detailed plans for direct carbon revenue sharing with participating communities.
Plantings and tree growth are monitored and verified, and farmers receive front-loaded, performance-based payments over a period of 7 to 10 years for carbon sequestration which is projected to take place over the course of 25 or more years. In addition, farmers benefit from their trees’ fruit and nut crop income, increased food and fuel security, improved soil quality, and reduced erosion.
COTAP Compared With Other Deforestation Programs
Certified carbon projects are more transparent, measurable, and accountable than “plant a tree” and other tree sponsorship programs because planting and forest protection activities are governed by detailed plans called Project Design Documents (PDD’s) and carbon accounting is performed according to Technical Specifications. Projects are routinely monitored and can only sell offsets if they are verified by third parties to be performing as planned. COTAP credits are fungible, trackable units that are issued and retired on the Markit Environmental Registry.
COTAP is also different because, through the market based tool of carbon offsets, you are taking responsibility for your personal contribution to climate change. By buying offsets, you are addressing your personal CO2 emissions by indirectly compensating others for the performing the service of counteracting the emissions which you haven’t yet been able to eliminate. Put simply, you’re paying others for the service of removing your carbon pollution. With COTAP, you’re going many steps further by also transforming livelihoods of some of the poorest communities on Earth.
Offsetting should be done alongside other equally important personal climate change actions, like advocating for cleaner energy sources and reducing your carbon footprint. Offsetting, advocacy, and reduction efforts all work together. For example, the process of measuring offsetting your emissions helps to reveal opportunities for reducing your footprint as well as areas where we need cleaner energy sources.
Affordability & Tax-deductibility
Choose from the Quick and Easy offsetting levels at right, and your tonnes will be allocated according to our average $9.90/tonne rate and distributed evenly across our four projects in Nicaragua, Uganda, Malawi, and India. To customize your number of tonnes of CO2 and what portion of your transaction goes to each of our projects, please see the Offsetting Options in our menu above. COTAP is a 501(c)3 non-profit, so offset transactions are 100% tax-deductible for U.S. residents.
Learn More About COTAP
To learn more, please see the Mission, Projects, How It Works, How We’re Different, Transparency, and Standards sections of our site and see our above menu.
