If you want to offset a flight, there are four jobs to do properly: work out the emissions, decide what kind of climate action you want to fund, check the quality of the carbon behind it, and make sure the resulting credit can be accounted for.
The first of those is a calculation. The other three are judgement.
I have worked with carbon projects since C Level was founded in 2000. I would not choose a project because somebody has put a cheap price beside a tonne of carbon, and I would not assume two carbon credits are equivalent because both say “one tonne” on the certificate.
What sits behind the tonne matters.
How to offset a flight in four steps
The practical process is:
- Calculate the flight’s climate impact. Use a method that gives you a credible CO2e estimate for the actual journey.
- Choose what you want to fund. We favour carbon removal and nature regeneration where the project and methodology support it.
- Check the carbon quality. Look at additionality, monitoring, verification, permanence, leakage and who benefits from the finance.
- Check the accounting. A credible carbon credit should be identifiable through a registry and protected against double counting. If credits are being used against an emissions claim, understand how and when they are retired.
That is the whole process in outline. The rest of this article explains what I would look for before putting money into a project.
What does offsetting a flight actually mean?
The flight has happened, or is going to happen. Burning the fuel creates emissions.
Buying a carbon credit does not take those aircraft emissions back out of the engine. It finances a separate climate outcome elsewhere, such as restoring forest that removes carbon dioxide from the atmosphere or protecting carbon that would otherwise be released.
I think this distinction is worth being precise about, because the language around flight offsetting has often run ahead of what carbon credits can actually prove.
In July 2026, the UK Advertising Standards Authority upheld a ruling against Qatar Airways over advertising that implied people could pay to fully offset the emissions from specific flights. The ASA told the airline not to state or imply that businesses or consumers could pay to fully offset the carbon emissions of a specific flight unless it held suitably robust substantiation for the claim.
That does not make carbon finance pointless. It means we should describe what it does accurately.
A well-designed carbon project can finance measurable climate action. It can also regenerate ecosystems and create long-term livelihoods. The original flight emission still happened.
Calculate your flight emissions first
Before deciding how much climate action to fund, you need the emissions figure.
We have built a separate tool for that job. You can calculate the emissions from your actual flight using C Level’s Flight Carbon Calculator.
I am deliberately not reproducing its methodology here. The calculator explains what is included in the result, the data it uses and the limits of the estimate.
Once you have the number, this article takes over.
Carbon removal and avoided emissions are not the same thing
A carbon removal takes carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and stores it.
Reforestation and agroforestry can do this as trees grow and carbon accumulates in woody biomass and soils.
An avoided emission is different. Protecting a forest that was genuinely at risk of being cleared can prevent carbon that is already stored there from being released.
Both can generate carbon credits under recognised methodologies. They are not the same climate outcome.
At C Level we now lead with regeneration and removals. I would rather see carbon finance creating forests, restoring degraded land and supporting the people who will look after those landscapes for decades.
That does not mean every removal credit is automatically good, or every avoidance project is automatically bad. You still have to look underneath the label.
What makes a flight carbon credit worth buying?
A recognised standard is useful. Plan Vivo, Gold Standard and the Verified Carbon Standard are examples of established carbon-crediting programmes.
But a standard’s name is not a substitute for understanding the project.
I would want answers to four fairly basic questions.
Is the carbon additional?
Additionality asks whether the climate outcome would have happened without the carbon finance.
If a forest was going to be planted anyway, selling a carbon credit for planting it has not caused an additional climate benefit.
This sounds obvious written down. Establishing it properly is one of the central jobs of a carbon methodology.
The Integrity Council for the Voluntary Carbon Market includes additionality among its Core Carbon Principles for high-integrity carbon credits.
What happens if the stored carbon is lost?
Biological carbon storage carries risk.
Trees can burn. They can be cut down. Land use can change.
A serious forestry project therefore needs a plan for permanence and reversal risk, rather than treating the act of planting a tree as the end of the story.
This is one reason I care so much about the relationship between the project and the people living on the land. Long-term carbon storage is much more credible when maintaining the forest also makes economic and social sense locally.
There is another related issue, leakage. Protecting or restoring one piece of land achieves rather less if the activity causing the emissions is simply pushed next door. Good project design has to account for that too.
Has the outcome been measured and independently checked?
A carbon project should have a methodology explaining how its carbon benefit is calculated, a monitoring system showing what has actually happened, and independent validation and verification.
Those words are not decorative.
Validation checks whether the project design and methodology meet the relevant requirements. Verification checks the reported outcomes against the standard and the evidence.
For nature projects, that can involve field measurements, sampling, remote sensing, project records and independent audit.
The exact machinery differs by project. What matters is that there is machinery.
Can the credit be traced and retired?
A carbon credit should not exist only as a line on an invoice.
Registries provide a record of issued credits and identifiers that allow them to be tracked. Retirement is the step used to take a credit out of circulation so it cannot simply be sold and claimed again.
That matters because double counting is not a philosophical problem. It is an accounting problem.
If two buyers are both claiming the same tonne, one tonne has somehow become two on paper.
It has not in the atmosphere.
Why the people receiving the carbon finance matter
Carbon accounting can tell you how many tonnes a project reports. It cannot tell you everything I want to know about the project.
I also want to know who controls the land, who made the decisions, who is being paid, and whether the people doing the work have a reason to keep doing it in ten or twenty years.
This is one of the reasons C Level has worked with Plan Vivo projects for so long.
Plan Vivo requires at least 60% of the income generated from the sale of Plan Vivo Certificates to go back to the communities on the ground.
One of the projects we know best is CommuniTree in Nicaragua. C Level first became involved when the project was still being built. It started in 2010, is coordinated by Taking Root, and Plan Vivo now describes it as the largest reforestation initiative in Nicaragua.
The programme works with 4,954 smallholder families, using afforestation, reforestation and agroforestry to create long-term income from trees grown on underused and degraded farmland. Plan Vivo records just over five million Plan Vivo Certificates issued by the project to date.
That combination matters to me. The carbon, the ecology and the livelihood are not three separate projects forced into the same brochure. They depend on each other.
Where the Core Carbon Principles fit
The voluntary carbon market now has another useful layer of scrutiny through the Integrity Council for the Voluntary Carbon Market, or ICVCM.
Its Core Carbon Principles are intended to identify high-integrity carbon credits through requirements covering areas such as governance, additionality, quantification, permanence and double counting.
On 4 August 2026, the ICVCM confirmed Plan Vivo’s PV Climate programme as CCP-Eligible where its conditions are met, including registration under Project Requirements v5.7 or later and validation and verification by accredited bodies.
Plan Vivo currently lists CommuniTree as certified under PV Climate Version 4. So I would not describe its current credits as CCP-labelled simply because the wider Plan Vivo programme has achieved CCP-Eligible status.
It is a technical distinction. It is also exactly the sort of distinction a carbon buyer should expect us to notice.
What happens to a carbon credit after it is bought?
A carbon project first has to generate a quantified carbon outcome under its methodology. The relevant standard and assurance process then determine whether credits can be issued.
Those credits are recorded through a registry.
Each credit or block of credits has identifying information so its history can be followed. Where a credit is being used against a claim, retirement is used to remove it from further circulation.
The useful chain to remember is:
project → measurement → verification → issuance → registry → retirement
If somebody is selling you a carbon credit, you should be able to ask where it sits in that chain.
You do not need to become a carbon-market auditor before taking responsibility for a flight. You should be able to see what you are funding.
How C Level approaches flight emissions
Our order is straightforward:
avoid what you reasonably can → reduce what remains → calculate the flight → fund credible climate action
We work with community-led nature projects that we have known, supported and in many cases visited over many years.
For the flight itself, our calculator does the calculation and shows the current contribution options. The supporting project information explains where the money goes and what the project does.
I do not think buying a carbon credit gives somebody permission to forget about the emissions from flying.
I do think putting serious money into forest regeneration, carbon removal and community-led climate projects is better than emitting the carbon and doing nothing else.
Both things can be true.
Should you offset a flight?
If you can reasonably avoid the flight, avoiding the emissions is the better result.
Sometimes you cannot. Sometimes the alternatives are impractical. Sometimes people are going to fly because they want to.
Driving is the alternative most people reach for, and it does not always win. How flying and driving emissions compare depends on the car, the number of people in it and the road distance.
For the flights that still happen, my view is that taking responsibility should involve more than clicking the cheapest green box offered at checkout.
Calculate the journey properly. Look at what the carbon finance actually creates. Choose a project you would still be comfortable supporting if nobody allowed you to call the flight “neutral”.
That is a much better test.
Calculate your flight and choose a project
Flight offsetting FAQs
Not automatically.
The flight still creates emissions. Funding a carbon project finances a separate climate outcome.
In the UK, environmental claims around offsetting need particular care. The ASA’s July 2026 Qatar Airways ruling is a useful example. The airline provided retirement certificates and registry evidence for its credits, and the unqualified claim that emissions from specific flights could be fully offset was still found to be misleading.
The quality test is the same.
Look at the project, the carbon standard, the methodology, the monitoring and verification, and how the credits are accounted for.
An airline can offer a strong project. An independent provider can offer a weak one. I would judge the carbon rather than the checkout screen.
No.
Sustainable aviation fuel, or SAF, is intended to reduce aviation’s lifecycle fuel emissions compared with conventional fossil jet fuel, where the applicable sustainability and lifecycle requirements are met.
Carbon offsetting funds a separate carbon reduction or removal outside the flight.
ICAO treats CORSIA-eligible fuels separately from carbon credits, although using eligible fuels can reduce an aircraft operator’s offsetting requirement under CORSIA.
No.
CORSIA is the International Civil Aviation Organization’s Carbon Offsetting and Reduction Scheme for International Aviation. It operates at aircraft-operator and international aviation level.
It is not the same thing as an individual passenger calculating one journey and choosing to fund a carbon project.
They can be, but “tree planting” tells you remarkably little on its own.
I would want to know what species are being planted, who controls the land, how the carbon is measured, how long the project is designed to last, how reversal risk is managed and what income the people maintaining the trees receive.
Creating a forest is a long-term land-use project.
Putting a seedling in the ground is the easy bit.
Sources and methodology
The principal external sources used for this article are:
- Integrity Council for the Voluntary Carbon Market: the Core Carbon Principles and the 4 August 2026 Plan Vivo PV Climate programme decision.
- Plan Vivo Foundation: the PV Climate standard, its community revenue-sharing requirement, and the CommuniTree project record. Plan Vivo operates the standard, so these sources are used for facts about its own requirements and projects rather than as independent endorsement.
- Advertising Standards Authority: the Qatar Airways ruling published 15 July 2026, used for the current UK position on unqualified claims that specific flight emissions can be fully offset.
- International Civil Aviation Organization: used only for the distinction between CORSIA, sustainable aviation fuels and voluntary passenger carbon funding.
- C Level’s flight carbon calculator: the calculation methodology is deliberately kept there, so this article does not compete with its route-specific search intent.