Project Costs

A Carbon Balanced offset produced by World Land Trust costs £15 per tonne CO2. This covers all project requirements, including any or all of the following:

• Land purchase for permanent incorporation in a nature reserve
• Purchase of seedlings from local, often family-run, nurseries
• Land preparation, planting and maintenance costs
• Other silvicultural work
• Exclusion of livestock
• Forest protection, including equipment and infrastructure
• Field staff and training
• Monitoring, combined with education and research programmes
• Project administration costs for the local partner organisation

This work is maintained through the project life-time and beyond, each project site being given over to permanent conservation management. Actual costs vary from place to place and the £15 price is an average, used for supporters, individual or corporate, sequestering up to 5,000 tCO2 p.a. Initiatives designed to meet the needs of larger-scale corporates are custom-designed and may carry lower prices per offset due to savings in scale. World Land Trust selects sites according to their biodiversity conservation importance, not cheapness of offsets, and the price therefore allows it to include initiatives in challenging areas with high project costs, as well as ‘easier’ targets.

The World Land Trust is a non-profit organisation and any difference between offsets income and expenditure is simply reinvested in more project work, usually used for the protection of standing forest. It reserves 15% of the offset price for its own administration, but keeps these costs to a minimum. Again, any excess at the end of the year is reinvested in actions meeting the WLT conservation mission.