Carbon Offsets To Alleviate Poverty

Carbon Offsets To Alleviate Poverty (COTAP) is a non profit organization that focuses on addressing climate change and poverty through reforestation projects all over the world. Their scope of action targets reducing the carbon footprint of donating individuals by planning and implementing transparent and accountable projects in underdeveloped areas, where individuals and communities live with an income of under 2 US dollars a day.

COTAP takes action in places where many communities make their living from agriculture. However, many of them cannot take full advantage of their land because it is not suitable for yielding crops. With this in mind, the organization creates programs seeking to make these communities less economically vulnerable by finding ways to use their land for other purposes, such as afforestation, reforestation, agroforestry, decreasing the overall carbon footprint, and ultimately generating supplemental income paid to the farmers as wages.

In order to achieve its goals, this non profit seeks to create awareness and open channels for individuals to participate in small-scale projects which are also tax-deductible by a crowdfunding, market based philanthropy model, giving forestry carbon credits which are in turn completely verifiable and lasting. COTAP aims to catalyze millions of validated carbon sequestration tons, mostly from developed countries, effectively planting millions of trees and ultimately creating millions of dollars in wages for hundreds of families and farmers. With COTAP’s help, donating individuals are directly taking a step towards fighting climate change and poverty at the same time.

COTAP has a silver transparency seal from GuideStar, is a proud member of the AmazonSmile program, and has been featured in Climate One, Rolling Stone, The New York Times, The Hill, Grist, and other highly reputable press sources.

Location: Donations are available worldwide.

Causes

Climate Change

Carbon Offsets To Alleviate Poverty (COTAP) has developed projects such as Trees for Global Benefits in Uganda, The Limay/CommuniTree project, the Khasi project in India, and the Clinton Development Initiative's Trees of Hope project in Malawi. Given the nature of this organization, active projects can change with the passage of time.

Poverty

All of COTAP’s projects are focused on creating wealth while decreasing the overall carbon footprint. Every project has its own socio-economic impact metrics. For example, reports from projects such as The Limay/CommuniTree project state that trees planted have generated more than 617,000 US dollars for participating communities. Another example is the Trees for Global Benefits project, which created 330,504 US dollars for farmers in 2016.