How to Calculate your Travel Carbon Footprint from your Flight

Worried about your carbon footprint after your latest flight or travel adventure? Want to reduce your impact on climate change? This article will talk a bit about what the ICAO is, how they calculate your carbon emissions and how you can offset your flight, through Carbonside or one of its trusted partners, supporting carbon offsetting projects and helping to reduce climate change.

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What is the ICAO?

The International Civil Aviation Organization is an agency of the United Nations that coordinates the principles and techniques of air navigation and fosters the planning and development of international air transport to ensure safe and orderly growth.

The ICAO is a global organisation that helps keep us safe whilst flying, making sure airlines are staying safe and legal with their information and variety of checks. The rules they've put in place over the last 50 years have ensured the safety of flights and travel we rely upon today. They've recently developed a piece of software, uses their data and experience to accurately account for the carbon footprint of your flight.

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Should I use the ICAO Carbon Offsets Calculator?

ICAO has developed a carbon calculator for estimating CO2 emissions from your flight for use in carbon offset programs. This carbon offsets calculator methodology utilizes the best publicly-available industry data based on a wide array of variables including aircraft type, route data, passenger weight factors, and cargo carried to generate your carbon footprint. Carbonside connects directly to the ICAO calculator and can help to calculate the carbon footprint of your flights, whether that be one way or a round trip. Whilst accurate, unfortunately, the ICAO does not allow you to offset your flight through their website.

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How do I get started with carbon offsetting for my flight?

Carbonside offers you a variety of ways to offset your carbon footprint. If you've got an application you want to offer offsetting through, you can integrate it via our API.

Just need to offset a single flight or a round trip? You can use our partners at OffsetMyTravel. They use the Carbonside trusted methodology to calculate your carbon footprint and help you reduce your emissions.

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What will my carbon offsetting support?

With Carbonside, your funds are helping support a variety of sustainable UN-certified carbon reduction projects addressing climate change. The project also reduces greenhouse gas emissions through a number of causes, such as clean cookstoves in Africa or hydroelectric power in India. This ensures that your offset helps international communities, whilst being as efficient at offsetting as possible. Carbonside works with a variety of global organisations to offset your carbon footprint, whether that be solely from your business flights or further business emissions.

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Who can benefit from this data?

Carbonside only uses sustainable Gold Standard, UN-verified offsets. This means various communities from around the world will benefit from your business offsetting, not through just carbon emissions reduction but a variety of social-economic benefits too. This includes helping people back into education and creating jobs in companies around the world, to support our climate offset programs helping to reduce climate change.

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How do I integrate this into my platform & access your free carbon calculator?

We believe any business should have access to our API and be able to calculate its carbon footprint, no matter the size of the venture. You can access our carbon calculator API at https://api.carbonside.co.uk for free, forever.

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