The Offset of Emissions
Who can Offset in Las Gaviotas
Most tree planting offset strategies to date have taken only the carbon capture capacity into account. Las Gaviotas is not just offsetting your emissions. It is helping in the conservation of the local biodiversity; is recreating the ancient tropical rainforest; is providing quality drinking water to the local communities and is helping to create new social conditions for poor Colombian communities by providing jobs and a better life.
Not all forest activities in the world help to absorb carbon dioxide and to fight climate change quite like a tropical forest. Only tropical forests can mitigate the effects of global warming in the best way because they have a large net cooling effect. A tropical forest like Las Gaviotas helps to increase cloudiness and rainfall through a process known as transpiration and condensation. The resulting shade of a fully canopied rain forest yields a significant net decrease in local surface soil and ambient temperatures.
In the tropics, a tree grows three times faster than in higher latitudes; this means that each tree in the rainy tropics removes more carbon dioxide from the atmosphere each year.
Las Gaviotas is a project that works with Caribbean pine and other native trees, helping to fight global warming by naturally absorbing carbon dioxide (CO2) and producing oxygen, while at the same time helping to re-grow the ancient Tropical Rainforest that was part of the Orinoco Savannah millions of years ago.
It is important to understand that the amount of CO2 absorbed can vary according to each species, the site, the local geography etc. For this reason, the ZERI Foundation calculates how many hectares of forest it will take to absorb particular levels of CO2 over a 30-year period.