Established in May 2019, this month, we celebrated CarbonEthics' second anniversary. The idea of having CarbonEthics arose when our co-founders 一Jessica Novia, Innandya Irawan, and Agung Bimo Listyanu一 met at One Young World 2018 in the Netherlands, representing their respective companies. They gather with people from around the world to discuss the world's most urgent issues. Our co-founder has the same thought to address the climate crisis. Therefore, they established a not-for-profit organization back home in Indonesia that we know today as CarbonEthics.
CarbonEthics Vision
Sustainable living for a healthy Earth and humanity.
CarbonEthics Mission
Demystify the climate crisis to inspire and enable climate action, while improving the livelihood of communities.
Our co-founder saw both threat and opportunity in humans and the ocean. According to NASA, the climate is naturally changing at a slow pace since years ago. At that time, the inhabitants can adapt. However, the rapid warming in recent times is destructive and leading to a climate crisis. The cause is excessive greenhouse gases (GHGs) emissions from burning fossil fuels, deforestation, livestock production, and other human activities. The catastrophe is already seen from extreme weather, biodiversity loss, melting antarctic ice, food and water shortage.
People who have never been exposed to the facts of the world's current situation tend to be apathetic towards the climate crisis and unaware of their carbon footprint. Some educated people aware of the climate crisis are still unfamiliar with the terms used and ways to solve the issue. Furthermore, the ocean, as the bigger portion of Earth with immense potential, is still underexplored.
As we discussed a week ago, from What You Need To Know: The Ocean and Carbon, we knew that our ocean faced a great threat from human activities on land. Ocean ecosystems were disrupted at a fast rate. It is unfortunate, as it has an essential role for the blue carbon sink. Blue carbon is the carbon stored by marine and coastal ecosystems. Ocean ecosystems also support marine life and coastal communities. Therefore, CarbonEthics aims to decelerate the climate crisis through climate education and blue carbon ecosystem conservation.
Two years is a short time, but we manage to make the most out of it. In one year (2019-2020), our active members grew from 4 to 82 people, impacting from 17 to 132 direct and indirect beneficiaries, and successfully sequestered from 424 to 1919 tonnes of carbon. The carbon offset is equivalent to 9.400 times an averaged size plane flight from Jakarta to Bali. Furthermore, we also have planting sites for marine and estuarine mangrove, seaweed, seagrass, and coral in Bintan Island, Riau; Rembang, Central Java; Pramuka and Harapan Island, DKI Jakarta. The calculated social return of investment (SROI) showed a value of 1:4. For every 1 USD invested in CarbonEthics Foundation, 4 USD worth of social value is generated.
Besides our social media (Instagram and LinkedIn), we also have CarbonVoice as an education platform for a wider audience. We hope that through CarbonVoice, our initiative and educational content are amplified broadly. Carbon calculator also has been a powerful tool for CarbonEthics to increase the awareness of individuals, businesses, organizations, and institutions on their carbon footprint. An increase in awareness will encourage a reduction in carbon emissions and an increase in carbon offset.
Partnering with coastal communities gives us the chance to contribute to their development. We provide training for the coastal community to do coral and mangrove tree planting and monitoring. We make sure that our operations are sustainable. During the covid-19 pandemic, we conducted digital campaigns to increase job opportunities and the livelihood of the impacted coastal communities.
Aside from our main focus on carbon education and improving the livelihood of coastal communities, we also take part in policy and advocacy. Our team was doing policy mapping to analyze the existing environmental policy to create impactful feedback and consult the policymakers. We also established relationships not only with the government but also national and international organizations and even conducted a 'Warkop Karbon Biru' event to discuss ideas and induce collaboration.
We also want to introduce climate-positive ecotourism, so people can become more accustomed to reducing and offsetting their carbon footprint while traveling. Moreover, the local community can also be positively affected through a clean and climate-positive environment. Therefore, we have Carbon EcoTrip that will make your traveling journey eco-friendly.
We have received grants from several organizations that keep us moving, established partnerships with reputable organizations and companies, being mentioned by Forbes, and received so much love from all of you. We are grateful for your enthusiasm for CarbonEthics in the past two years. We hope that you can continue supporting our initiative and join our fight to decelerate the climate crisis through blue carbon by spreading our messages, volunteering, or donations. You can read and access the full version of CarbonEthics 2020 annual report here!
If you enjoy reading this article, please tune-up for the next post! While waiting, consider checking out our free crash course to climate change and blue carbon ecosystem called Carbon Voice Curriculum or support us by visiting our website CabonEthics.org (we have cute and powerful babies for you to adopt!). Lastly, I would like to invite all of you, readers, to reduce what you can, offset what you cannot with CarbonEthics.