A recent article confirms that demand for carbon offsetting has grown rapidly, citing the "Greta Thunberg effect" and stating that NGOs and other organisations involved in carbon offsetting have seen as much as a fourfold increase in investment from people who want to try to mitigate their carbon footprints.

The bottom line is that CO2 offsetting is in demand by air travellers and CarbonITe™ gives online travel agents, tour operators and travel companies the means to offer it.

By creating an API we have made the integration process as straightforward as possible so that CO2 offsetting can be easily incorporated into any existing internet-connected application and, for travel agencies, included in the existing stages of your booking flow.

CO2 Calculation API calls are made after a flight or holiday has been added into the traveller's basket, so that the cost to offset the CO2 generated by the flight itinerary, transportation or hotel is displayed as an add-on item, alongside meals, baggage, seats, etc.

All you need to send in the query are the journey details and CarbonITe™ will return all the information for you to display the CO2 offset options in your UI, including scheme descriptions and links to pictures.

When the traveller adds the CO2 offset into their basket, you take payment using your existing method and then send the second API call "Issue Certificate", with a unique transaction key and the scheme identifier, to book the CO2 offset and generate a PDF certificate showing the amount of CO2 that has been offset using an accredited scheme.

Giving your customers the option to offset their CO2 can both enhance and differentiate your brand by adding sustainability credentials.

Moreover, with demand for CO2 offsetting growing, CarbonITe™ can help keep eco-minded customers from booking their flights elsewhere and also help you to target the next generation of environmentally conscious travellers.

From a financial perspective, the cost per tonne of CO2 reduces as the amount to be offset grows and we offer a bonus scheme to pass on these economies of scale to you, our customer, whereby, if certain targets are met, there is a reduction in cost per tonne of CO2 offset.

In addition, we offer a comprehensive suite of mark-up tools that allow you to add a percentage-based mark-up (with minimum fixed mark-up amount), a fixed mark-up, a rounding up the offset cost to the nearest 10p, 50p or £1 and/or a minimum offset cost.

All CO2 Calculation and Offset API calls are stored in our secure AWS database.

The CarbonITe™ customer Dashboard allows you to see all of your offsetting transactions in a user-friendly graphical format, giving you multiple metrics to help you keep track of all your CO2 offsettting activity.

CO2 offset calculations per day, look-to-book ratios, total amount of CO2 offset, offsets per scheme and number of CO2 offset certificates issued are just some of the areas reported in the Dashboard.

Moreover, you can select to view CO2 offset activity using date ranges and download the transaction data in a CSV file, so that the information can be brought into your back office accounting system for reconciliation purposes.

Streamlined Energy and Carbon Reporting (SECR) is a UK Government regulation requiring certain companies to report their carbon emissions under The Companies (Directors' Report) and Limited Liability Partnerships (Energy and Carbon Report) Regulations 2018 which came into force on 1 April 2019.

The Department for Business, Energy & Industrial Strategy (BEIS) has published new guidance to help more than 11,000 businesses to prepare for the new energy and emission rules covered by SECR.

ISO 14001:2015 specifies the requirements for an environmental management system (EMS) that an organization can use to enhance its environmental performance. It is intended for use by an organization seeking to manage its environmental responsibilities in a systematic manner that contributes to the environmental pillar of sustainability.

ISO 14001:2015 helps an organization achieve the intended outcomes of its environmental management system, which provide value for the environment, the organization itself and interested parties.

Consistent with the organization's environmental policy, the intended outcomes of an environmental management system include:

• enhancement of environmental performance
• fulfilment of compliance obligations
• achievement of environmental objectives

There are numerous offsetting schemes available for you to offer to your customers, from global CO2 offsetting projects to regional UK tree planting schemes.

You can choose which schemes you wish to offer and we return details of each scheme in the API message responses, including pictures, so your customers know exactly how they are helping to combat climate change.

All of the Carbon Offsetting projects that we offer are certified to the highest standard by national and international bodies, including the Verified Carbon Standard, the Gold Standard and Certified Emissions Reduction carbon credits issued by the Clean Development Mechanism under the Kyoto Protocol of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC).

Moreover, all transactions are fully auditable and all of our Carbon Offsetting schemes are managed by our specialist ISO 14001 and ISO 9001 certified partners, giving you and your customers peace of mind.

Click here to view some of the CO2 offsetting schemes that we offer.

CarbonITe™ uses only fully accredited schemes for CO2 offsetting, ensuring that your contributions toward the fight against climate change make a real difference.

All of the schemes we offer are verified, certified and monitored by either the Verified Carbon Standard, the Gold Standard or by the Clean Development Mechanism under the Kyoto Protocol of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC).

Coupled with our end-to-end transaction logging and tracking, we offer unparalelled transparency, not only to our customers but also to their customers as well.

The CarbonITe™ system allows us to add as many CO2 offsetting schemes as we want, so if you have a CO2 offsetting scheme that you would like to use, let us know and we'll get in touch with the scheme provider and get it loaded into the system.

We use Amazon Web Services (AWS) to host the CarbonITe™ application, simply because its reliabile, scalable and cost-effective.

In addition, AWS's cloud-based solution has a world class, highly secure infrastructure, both physically and over the internet.

For flexibility, AWS allows us to leverage its auto-scaling technology to build a self-managing infrastructure aligned closely to the actual need based on traffic/resources utilization and Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) enable us to spin-up clones in multiple regions for different environments within a few minutes, eliminating the need to repeat the set-up steps every time.

Well, it depends...

In the UK, VAT is not generally applicable to voluntary CO2 offsets; offsets that are made voluntary by companies or members of the public.

However, the UK Tree Planting scheme is VAT-able, as it is classed by HMRC as a service, and CO2 offsets that are made on Certified Emission Reductions (CERs) schemes, either voluntarily or for compliance reasons such as ISO 14001 certification, are also VAT-able.

This is because CERs are a tradable comodity and, as such, are subject to VAT.

We'd love to hear from you!

Drop us a line or fill out your details in the contact form below and we'll be in touch to have a chat and to provide you with access details to the CarbonITe™ API!