Carbon offsetting is a way to get rid of that guilty feeling we get from flying on holiday. It is essentially paying an organisation to reduce the carbon in the atmosphere by an equal amount that your flight is emitting. There are many companies that will do this, but the one we recommend is carbonfootprint as they are UK based, have effective projects, and are reasonably priced.

How you go about choosing which site you wish to use is entirely down to you, but here are a few of my favourites including a massive plug for the one company that had time to pick up their phone and answer my questions!

If it was my flight, this would be the company I would choose. They are UK based (Basingstoke to be exact), and have some outstanding projects as well as reasonable prices.

They calculate the carbon tonnage for UK projects using the methodology outlined by the UK government, so we can trust that they are bumping up your carbon emissions to squeeze a few more pounds out of you. For those who are especially keen you can check out how that value is calculated here.

Their international projects are all verified by international standards on greenhouse emissions and follow strict rules for carbon offsetting companies. Overall I am completely satisfied that they aren't swindling me out of money for no reason!

The one downside is that they are a 'for-profit' company, so I phoned them to probe a little into the percentage of profit that they put back into their projects, and I was pleasantly surprised. For international projects; such as the deforestation reduction prject in Brazil, or the various efficient cooking projects in Uganda and Kenya, they are putting over 70% of profit margin back into these projects. When I asked why this wasnt higher they answered that the money was used to pay wages, find further projects to get involved with, and to invest in establishing the business futher so that they can reach more people.

For their UK project, 100% of money donated to this project is spent directly into that same project. It's a fantastic project and has a twofold effect. Firstly, trees are sent to UK schools so that children across the country can get hands on experience and understand the importance of trees as part of our ecosystem. Secondly, and the real deal-clincher for me, trees are planted in the Amazon Rainforest in Brazil to guarentee that the carbon is reliably offset. For more information on this project and more click here.

This German not-for-profit company is pretty great. 100% of anything you spend goes to carbon offsetting schemes, but you will be spending quite a chunk. I'm not quite sure how they give such different figures to other sites, but they are often considerably more expensive. They do, however, have exactly the right idea when it comes to the work they are doing. They see it as an effective second best, as shown by this quote from their site, which is in English so don't worry.

“Compensation cannot solve the problem of climate change since it does nothing to change the actual source of CO2. It is a necessary second-best solution as long as the best solution does not yet exist. Individual flight passengers are responsible for examining their actions prior to compensating emissions.”