BA's offset goose is cooked

A carbon offsetting firm used by British Airways and Barclays has sunk thousands of pounds of consumers' money into a project without knowing how far it has cut carbon emissions.

Climate Care, one of the UK's largest offsetting firms, funded the project in Honduras to install 1,440 fuel-efficient, wood- burning stoves in slum dwellers' homes. But almost two years after it handed over the money, it has not yet properly audited the scheme.

It has also emerged that Climate Care does not know how many of the stoves have been installed as a result of its contribution because other organisations have also granted money to the project.

The revelation will fuel public scepticism about carbon offsetting, which is not yet properly regulated. Consumers wanting to cancel out their emissions, for example from air travel, can pay companies such as Climate Care to invest in green energy projects that offset the same amount of pollution.

Climate Care gave £30,000 to a charity backed by one of the Sainsbury family charitable trusts in 2005. This money was awarded to a separate US charity, Trees Water People (TWP), to install the 1,440 stoves in the Honduras.

Climate Care said these stoves would cut carbon emissions by 7,000 tons. But Stuart Conway, a director of TWP, said: "The Climate Care money was merged with streams of funding from the Finnish government and from the Weyerhaeuser Foundation [a US charity] to build the 1,440 stoves."

Chris Goodall, author of How to Live a Low-carbon Life, who investigated the project, said: "When people pay for an offset, they expect the money to be invested in a scheme that reduces emissions by a defined amount. The Honduras project is very worthwhile, but there is no way of telling how many extra stoves the Climate Care money has bought or by how much CO₂ emissions have been reduced."

Tom Morton, a director of Climate Care, said projects like that in Honduras would help to promote efficient cooking technologies "on a significant scale" in the developing world.

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