ClimateHero: offset your carbon footprint in just 5 minutes (Carbon Calculator 2022)

If you are concerned about your carbon footprint and impact to the environment, this post (and tool) is for you.

What is ClimateHero?

I recently stumbled upon ClimateHero, which can calculate your carbon impact in just 5 minutes! It is an extremely cool project that aims to help people be carbon neutral.

In Sweden there’s this concept about flight-shame (flygskam), which is an anti-social movement trying to reduce the environmental impact around aviation. Since I arrived here, I’ve always been concerned about offsetting my carbon footprint in an easy and simple way. Airlines have started to implement this when you buy the ticket (such as KLM and SAS).

But the problem is worse than just aviation. We have an impact for everything we do, even something simple as holding our pictures on a cloud storage.

ClimateHero Carbon Calculator 2022

ClimateHero takes a simple first stab at the problem to make things easier. You can take the survey, and after 5 minutes of answering a few questions, it will tell you approximately how much is your carbon impact.

Then, it lets you offset this carbon footprint in various ways and amounts. Here you can watch a quick overview of the project.

How does Carbon offsetting work?

Carbon offsetting means neutralizing your own carbon footprint by reducing others’ emissions. It is a smart way to take responsibility for the carbon emissions that you are causing but have not been able to reduce by making changes in your own lifestyle..

The money you pay is invested in climate positive projects that would not have happened without the financing from the carbon offset. Most of the time, these climate projects take place in developing countries, where the focus is on replacing fossil fuels with renewable energy such as solar and wind plants or capturing carbon dioxide by conserving or planting trees..

How does ClimateHero work with carbon offsets?

ClimateHero works diligently to find, analyze, and invest in the most effective carbon offset projects available in order to optimize:

• The climate benefit – How many tons of CO2 are eliminated?
• The risk – How likely are the promised climate improvements to be reached or even surpassed?
• Cost effectiveness – What is the cost per ton required to achieve the climate benefit?
• Social improvement – How do the projects improve the lives of people in developing countries?

We are proactively seeking new climate projects and we analyze, audit and evaluate each project by the above parameters.

How do I know my whole footprint will be truly eliminated?

ClimateHero only invests in climate projects that withstand the market’s toughest audits. That means investments in projects that adhere to the CDM (the UN’s Clean Development Mechanism) and Gold Standard (supported by Greenpeace and WWF) benchmarks.

By investing in a portfolio with several chosen projects shared by all Climate Heroes, the risk will spread out for a much safer investment than if you as an individual were to invest in one particular project. That is the same logic as investing in a mutual fund instead of buying a single stock to reduce risk.

But even if you look at the best projects on the market and spread the risk among them, there is, of course, always a risk that individual projects will not achieve the promised climate benefits.

To be 100% sure that we neutralize all of your footprint, we will offset twice as many tons as your estimated footprint indicates. That means even if some climate projects, against expectation, do not achieve the promised climate benefit or if you sometimes need to take an unavoidable flight, then the doubling principle will ensure that you are still living carbon neutral.

How can I Offset my Carbon Footprint in Sweden?

Take the survey here and chose to offset your carbon footprint with ClimateHero.