Carbon Tanzania

We are always trying to improve on the good our safaris do; it’s part of the DNA of each Royal African Safari. It is also why we founded the Royal African Foundation over twenty years ago.

In 2021 we committed to offsetting the unavoidable emissions from our safaris with Carbon Tanzania. We looked at a number of different options, and we chose Carbon Tanzania because they offer a verified way to offset emissions whilst also protecting biodiversity, soil and water.

Carbon Tanzania is primarily in the business of forest conservation. They work with communities and governments to realise the economic value of their forests, and they finance this work through the sale of carbon offsets. Their offsets are verified by Verified Carbon Standard, Plan Vivo and CCB Standards.

Most (>70%) of Tanzania’s carbon emissions are from deforestation, due mainly to shifting agriculture.

On the ground, if families do not benefit from a forests’ existence and they cannot afford to feed themselves and send their children to school, they will understandably cut down the trees and clear the habitat to grow food and earn so they can try to do this. Even if the shifting to agriculture often has marginal financial returns.

Thanks to Carbon Tanzania, forest communities’ are getting direct benefits from protecting their forests. Their tropical forest ecosystems are worth more to them intact. Protecting intact tropical ecosystems is part of the solution to the twin crises of biodiversity loss and climate change. For more on this, go to https://www.globalsafetynet.app/.

Carbon Tanzania also supports the work of other organisations such as Dorobo Fund which is helping communities in northern Tanzania to secure rights to their natural resources and traditional lands.

More than this, though, Carbon Tanzania is doing it in a way that protects contiguous ecosystems, and contiguous ecosystems are crucial for protecting biodiversity both now and in the long term.

Carbon Tanzania focuses on connectivity between reserve land and biodiversity, specifically migration routes, to have the greatest impact. By connecting ecosystems, they create value for the communities adjacent to larger protected areas. In the map, the green arrows indicate their current project areas, and the red arrows indicate village lands with high conservation value that they are looking at for project development.

Avoided forest conversion provides the most cost-effective mechanism to reduce carbon emissions whilst protecting biodiversity, soil and water (Griscome et al. 2017). Particularly in comparison to other options such as tree planting, which also require claiming land back for trees and ensuring that that land remains forested for at least 30 years, if not indefinitely, to provide verified emissions offsets.

In short, with Carbon Tanzania, you get much more bang for your Carbon Credit buck, and this is why we chose them to offset the emissions from our safaris.

If you would like to learn more about them, their projects and their impacts up to date, please visit www.carbontanzania.com.