Carbon Offsets To Alleviate Poverty

Mission

The mission of Carbon Offsets To Alleviate Poverty (COTAP.org) is to empower individuals in developed countries to simultaneously tackle the world’s biggest environmental challenge (climate change) and the world’s biggest humanitarian challenge (extreme poverty).

The Problems

In developing countries around the world, hundreds of millions of people live in rural areas on less than $2 per day. This is the poverty level which forces people to make hard choices between food, health care, and education. It is the poverty level where people are extremely vulnerable, where it’s a matter of life and death, and where an estimated 11 million children die every year. Simply from being too poor. Sadly, many of these same people are not good fits for traditional microfinance, which tends to be primarily urban, and they are also disconnected from markets for goods which they could produce to be sold elsewhere.

Meanwhile, tree planting programs, also known as afforestation and reforestation (A/R), have unsurpassed potential for reaching such communities and for creating direct, significant, verifiable and lasting economic benefits for them. One of the most compelling ways to finance such activities is through carbon offsets, but existing offset organizations and investors are only able to quantify and pay for the carbon commodity part of the equation, which is only half of the story.  Further, A/R as a category is unique when compared to the majority of other carbon project types because its credits are issued slowly, are small relative to necessary amount of up-front investment, and entail a variety of unique risks, albeit highly manageable ones.

Factors such as these have created a forestry carbon financing gap, and COTAP is founded on the belief that this gap, though very understandable, is an  unacceptable market failure given forestry carbon projects’ ability to reach and empower the world’s most vulnerable populations.

Our Solution

COTAP is a dedicated intermediary which has both social and environmental missions. We source carbon offset funds from those who care about both climate change and poverty alleviation. We then transparently match those funds to forestry projects in order to fill the forestry carbon finance gap, restore landscapes, and create direct, significant, verifiable, and lasting benefits for the most economically vulnerable people in the world. On an annual basis, COTAP aims to eventually catalyze millions of tonnes of validated carbon sequestration, millions of planted trees, and tens of millions of dollars in wages to hundreds of thousands of villagers who live on less than $2 per day. Unlike “crowdsourced” philanthropic models which involve loans, grants, matched savings, or guarantees, COTAP involves wages.

COTAP will create a new system whereby the world’s most vulnerable perform the service of counteracting the unavoidable carbon footprint of individuals in developed countries.  We believe this has the potential to be a service as tangible as preparing your taxes or mowing your lawn.  This will not be simple, easy, or quick, but this is one of the many things that is worth doing despite all of the challenges.  It requires a movement, and we invite you to join us in our movement to make tomorrow brighter.