Shopping for My Wedding… Offsets

For some, buying a wedding dress is the most harrowing experience of their big day. For me, it was buying carbon offsets.

The first time I tried to buy carbon offsets was when I was planning my wedding. It was the spring of 2018, and my partner Rohit and I were in the thick of it. We both come from boisterous Indian-American families. It would be a big, week-long celebration.

Besides a love for food and parties, Rohit and I also shared a deep concern for the climate crisis. As we made decisions about wedding caterers, venues, and details, we considered cost, style, experience — and carbon.

We made some deliberate choices to reduce emissions, for instance:

• planning outdoor events where possible, avoiding energy-intensive heating and cooling (aside — it ended up being 100F the day of our actual wedding ceremony, so I wouldn’t say I was thrilled about this)
• buying outfits that we would be able to reuse
• waiting to go on a honeymoon until we could combine it with other flights
• limiting meat to two meals in the celebration week, and choosing not to serve red meat at all
• using reusable and compostable dishware

However, we knew enough about climate change to know that our guests’ flights would be by far the largest driver of our wedding’s emissions. I felt guilty about asking over 100 people to get on flights to California.

To compensate, we decided to offset our wedding guests’ footprints for the weekend. First, we did the calculations on how much to offset. I geeked out on researching and building a complicated excel model — based on flights, venues, local transportation, food, and lodging.

The next step was to find which offsets to buy and from where. I read dozens of articles and papers about where to buy offsets. Once I found a couple of sites I trusted, I sifted through hundreds of pages of reports to identify the best projects from these sites. I called the offset providers themselves to talk to the people who had verified the projects. It took me weeks to speak to a real person with first-hand knowledge of the project, and when I did finally get him on the phone, he couldn’t give me any recent updates on the project or a specific confirmation of my singular ownership of the offset.

I couldn’t help but think: something as important as carbon offsets should not be this difficult to buy.

Soon after the wedding, I embarked on another journey — founding a company. With Joro, my vision was to make it as accessible for someone to improve their carbon footprint as it was to save money or lose weight.

As I navigated buying offsets for myself, I realized this would be a part Joro’s offering, too. Not everyone wants to, needs to, or has the means to offset an event as large as a wedding. But many people might want to buy carbon offsets to compensate for parts of their carbon footprint that they can’t reduce.

I’ve spent the last year researching and building out the first version of the Joro app. Along the way, we’ve learned a few things about buying carbon offsets*:

• Verifiable — A project’s reduction in emissions must be measured and verified by a trustworthy, independent third party.
• Additional — A project must show strong evidence that the emissions reduction it creates wouldn’t have happened without the project.
• Permanent — A project must demonstrate it has taken steps to ensure it won’t be destroyed by natural or human causes during the emissions reduction period.
• Airtight — A project must demonstrate it hasn’t caused emissions to increase somewhere else. For instance, this could happen if a forestry protection project simply displaces logging to another forest.
• Enforceable — We need evidence that carbon credits issued from a project are backed by a contract with exclusive ownership — that is, they can’t be sold more than once. Seems crazy, but this really happens.

Starting this month, I’ll be personally following up with every user who has purchased a carbon offset from Joro to help them understand where their money is going and what it is doing, as best as we can trace it. If you’re curious for more information on identifying high-quality carbon offsets, check out our blog, “How to Buy Carbon Offsets.”

My hope and prediction is that as demand for offsets grows, offerings will improve in quality and in price. Margins will decline for offset retailers, and middlemen will be cut out. Consumers will create demand for new, high-quality emissions reduction projects to enter the market.

If we all know a little more about how to shop for high-quality offsets, we can make this happen sooner rather than later.

*An easy way to remember this criteria is that good offsets PAAVE the way for emissions reduction.