Offset your CO₂ emissions reliably, in Europe

When you subscribe, you help reduce carbon emissions in Europe. We will offset half of your carbon footprint by planting trees. For the other half, we will buy emission allowances and take them off the market. This ensures that no one else can use these allowances. This means that your subscription reduces the overall amount of CO₂ that climate damaging plants (like coal fired power plants) can emit.

You’ll automatically get a donation receipt via email in the first quarter of the following year. If you pay tax in Germany, you can use this to deduct the amount of your climate subscription from your taxes. Pay tax in another European country? Then the deductibility of donations depends on your local regulations.

We base our price on the cost of planting trees and buying EU emission rights. Our price reflects the high quality of our compensation measures. Planting trees in Germany costs about 10 times more than it does in developing countries. But by planting trees in Germany, you can be assured that the new forests will be sustained well into the future.

The price of emission rights has risen sharply—and that’s a good thing! The years when it cost only €6 to emit a tonne gave organisations little incentive to emit less. Although the price has been fluctuating around €100 today, it must rise further as we transform into a climate-friendly economy.

The market price of EU emission rights is set by supply and demand. The price you see on our donation forms is based on emission rights that we’ve purchased already. We buy them in bulk, to make sure we can cancel them for the amount that you donate.

We want to keep the price of running subscriptions stable. So after you sign up for a climate subscription, we may inform you of price changes—only once or twice a year. With that, you can choose to either adjust your monthly donation or your offset amount.

We also want to keep the prices on the donation forms close to current market prices. So it’s possible that the prices you see on the website are higher or lower than that of a subscription you signed up for in the past.

You should be able to live a carbon neutral lifestyle even if prices increase. That’s why we also help you to reduce your carbon footprint. This doesn’t just make it cheaper for you to offset your remaining carbon footprint, but it’s better for the planet too.

We are a non-profit organisation. A maximum of 15% of the subscription price goes towards sustaining and growing our business. This means that at least 85% your contribution goes directly towards your climate protection measures.

Yes, you can make an amazing difference! Take the story of the hummingbird. A terrible fire burns in the jungle. The hummingbird flies to the nearest stream, takes a few drops in his beak and pours them onto the flames. The sloth asks if he is crazy—surely a few drops will do nothing? The hummingbird answers, “I know, but I’m doing my part.” Imagine what a difference a whole group of hummingbirds could make.

Every tenth of a degree matters. Together, we can all do our part to keep global warming as low as possible, even if it can’t be completely prevented. Every tenth of a degree saves more species from extinction, reduces sea level rise, combats drought and prevents the spread of dangerous diseases. Every action for the climate is important.

You can become part of a community of hummingbirds who are all doing their part to protect our planet.

Because we want to offer you the best way to become carbon neutral. Offsetting projects in developing countries are based on a mechanism that expired in 2020. As part of the Paris Climate Agreement, all states-including developing countries-have committed themselves from 2020 onwards to their own climate related targets. Of course, it’s good to help other countries reach their climate targets. But our goal is to make you, and therefore Europe, carbon neutral. To achieve this, we must reduce emissions at home.

Yes, just send us a mail at info@fortomorrow.eu.

Your subscription lets us buy emission permits for you. This means you take away the right to emit carbon from an industrial plant. Industrial plants must either upgrade so they cause less emissions, or shut down. Overall, less carbon dioxide will be released in Europe.

This works because in the EU, companies have to pay for their carbon emissions. The energy sector, industry and (in some cases) airlines must buy emissions permits each year. The EU sets a limit on the number of these permits, so that carbon emissions are reduced by at least 55% by 2030. The emissions are recorded and checked every year by the TÜV. Huge fines are imposed if permits aren’t submitted.

No, there is no change to the amount of electricity produced, just how it is produced. If there are fewer emission permits on the market then that means their price will increase. In the short term, electricity will be produced with lower carbon emissions- in modern gas-fired power plants for example. In the future, it will lead to more low carbon energy sources like solar and wind power.

No. Before ForTomorrow was founded, we asked Prof. Dr. Grischa Perino about that too though! He considers it possible that the EU would limit the extent to which ForTomorrow could influence the Emission Trading System (EU ETS), but only when we’d cancel so many emission rights, that it would threaten its functioning. We’d need to buy hundreds of millions of emission rights to get to that point. We’re nowhere near that.

The goal of the EU is to reduce emissions and reach the Paris goal of keeping global heating below 1.5 degrees. The EU ETS is the primary instrument to do that. When it was designed, canceling emission rights for additional climate protection was already considered a valid use case.

Emission permits are auctioned on energy exchanges by the European governments. This money then flows into energy and climate funds and is invested in climate protection. In Germany alone, more than 1 billion euros were invested in low-carbon building refurbishment and the development of electro-mobility in 2018.

The European Commission introduced the Market Stability Reserve to reduce the surplus of emissions permits. There’s a number of reasons why there is a large surplus of emissions permits:

• Too many emissions permits were available to industry and plant operators. Unused permits could be carried over from year to year.
• The 2008/2009 economic crisis reduced production more than expected. This reduced emissions too and meant permits were left over.
• Plants could offset part of their emissions through emission reductions in developing countries.

So, the EU decided to auction fewer emissions permits. The ones that were’t auctioned were moved to the market stability reserve. The EU records how many emissions permits are in the market. It also records how many have been handed in for carbon emissions or were cancelled.

The EU decides how many emissions allowances will be auctioned and how many will be put in the reserve. They decide this based on how many emissions permits are available. From 2023, surplus emissions permits will be cancelled from the reserve. If you cancel emissions permits yourself today, then the EU may cancel fewer in the future.

To prevent this, at first we will hold the emission permits in our account. They aren’t available to the market- because we won’t sell them again. But they’ll be counted as available surplus permits, which will lead to the EU cancelling more emissions permits.

We will only delete the emissions permits when the EU stops deleting them. This will happen when no more emissions permits are moved to the reserve. According to current rules, that’s when the surplus of emission permits is below 833 million tonnes.

Because just reducing carbon emissions is no longer enough. Atmospheric carbon dioxide has risen so much that even if the whole world lived carbon neutral from now on, climate change would continue. So, what’s the best way to capture CO₂ from the atmosphere? Research from experts has made it clear. Despite new and promising technologies, it’s most efficient and cost effective to simply plant trees.

Honestly, planting trees in tropical regions is most carbon and cost effective. But the long-term sustainability of trees is crucial. A freshly planted tree only captures small amounts of carbon. The bigger it grows the more carbon it captures. So it’s not useful if a new tree dies of dehyrdration, is caught in a wildfire or is cut down for more economically attractive farmland. So why plant in Germany? In Germany forests are protected. Wildfires are quickly put out. Illegal logging is stopped. Trees can continue to grow and continue to capture more carbon. And it’s an important step to make Europe carbon neutral for the future.

Climate-resistant forests are mixed forests. On average, 5 newly planted trees will have captured 1 tonne of CO₂ from the atmosphere after 80 years. So we plant 4 trees to compensate for 1 tonne. How do we work out how much carbon the trees capture? We are guided by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) method, which is also used for the German Federal Forest Inventory.

Remember that your contribution to these new forests remains after 80 years and will capture even more carbon from the atmosphere.

We work with the Schutzgemeinschaft Deutscher Wald for the afforestation projects. For more than 60 years, this nature conservation association has been planting trees throughout Germany. The process happens on state-owned land. This means newly planted forests belong to society.

According to a recent study by ETH Zurich, an further 3.18 million hectares can be planted in Germany. To do our part to protect the climate, this is the area we should reforest.