Two days ago I arrived in Queensland and you won't believe all the exciting adventures I experienced since: Glasshouse Mountains, Australian Zoo, Fraser Island, Noosa, Surfing Lessons. Blogs about it will follow soon! Thanks to Emirates and them upgrading me to Business class, my holiday started on the plane and I arrived rested. Here a picture of crew members Mike and Bryana. Some more fun pictures will follow as soon as I get my hands on a scanner.
While I am very excited to be here in Queensland, from the outset my wish was that the natural wonders of Queensland and the Great Barrier Reef would be there for future generations. Before setting off on my trip, I realized there is no better place to start making my journey sustainable than myself, so I went online to myclimate.org to calculate the emissions that would be created by my trip in order to buy quality offsets (Gold Standard CERs), i.e. carbon credits. The website offers a handy calculator for figuring out the emissions you generate in your everyday life and by travelling. It is surprisingly accurate and simple to use at the same time.
Luckily, my brother Andrej currently works in London in the field of carbon credits and knows a thing or two about emission reduction projects, so I got a decent idea of how offsetting can make a difference for our climate and nature, especially if many people do it. Most high standard emission reduction projects either fund renewable energy to replace fossile energy in places where this would not be economically viable without the sale of carbon credits or by funding the destruction of greenhouse gases, e.g. methane where they are created by waste, mining or industry. The resulting carbon credits, so called Certified Emission Reductions or CERs are issued by an agency of the UN after a lengthy process of registration, monitoring and verification. They represent emissions, which have already been reduced in a certified project, so this is not an investment into some vague promise about the future, but very much based on real data and emission reductions.
Sustainability is everyone's business.
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