The carbon projects supported by SCB have strong community benefits and help companies or individuals to offset their emissions. All projects go through careful quality and credibility assessments, including site visits to certain of our projects by members of our carbon team.
SCB’s Ben Crick reports from a community-based clean water filtration programme in Nepal to see where the carbon finance is going and the tangible community benefits on the ground.
Here in Nepal, natural water is contaminated, which leads to illnesses like diarrhoea and typhoid. This is leading to children missing school and their parents missing work, which is leading to less income, more money spent on medical fees, on an already tight budget.
Before our partners installed these water filters, those who chose to decontaminate their water were using biomass, so they were going into the forest, foraging for wood, chopping down trees and bushes as well as other biomass, and they would use this to burn, to boil the water, to get rid of illnesses and the bacteria.
This process was leading to deforestation, as well as releasing toxic smoke into the households which leads to further health problems.
We’re supporting our partners to install these filters, which relieve the need to boil water, and hence the deforestation doesn’t occur, so the associated emissions are reduced and avoided.
Tackling climate change can seem like a daunting challenge because it’s such a global problem, but that doesn’t mean that as individuals we can’t do our part.
If you’ve ever wondered what it means to offset your individual emissions, it involves supporting projects like the ones I’ve described and the ones that you’ve seen in the videos, as well as clean cooking solutions, social forestry projects and renewable energy programmes.
Without your support these projects wouldn’t happen.
