About PopOffsets

What is it about?

PopOffsets is unique - we are operating the only project in the world that helps individuals and organizations to offset their carbon footprint by funding the unmet need for family planning, reproductive health and sex and relationship education.

Our project recognizes the intrinsic link between increasing CO₂ emissions, climate change and the world's ever-growing population.

Meeting the currently unmet need for family planning is one of the most cost effective ways of minimising climate change. Moreover, other energy solutions, while they reduce CO₂ emissions compared to fossil fuels, have unwanted environmental impacts.

Who are the Partners?

PopOffsets is a project of the Optimum Population Trust.

The Optimum Population Trust is a UK-registered environmental charity (No. 1114109) and a company limited by guarantee (No. 3019081) founded in 1991 as an educational charity think tank and campaign group that supports sustainable population levels for the planet. Its main aims are;

• Challenging the view that perpetual population growth is desirable or even possible.
• Highlighting the inevitable consequences of ever-increasing population on the earth's finite resources.
• Promoting intelligent and reasoned discussion about the effects of population growth on the global environment and its contribution to the deeply threatening problem of global warming.

OPT’s patrons are:

Sir David Attenborough OM, CH, CVO, CBE, FRS , Naturalist, broadcaster and trustee of the British Museum and Royal Botanical Gardens, Kew; and a former controller of BBC Two.

Professor Sir Partha Dasgupta, Frank Ramsey Professor of Economics, University of Cambridge

Professor Paul Ehrlich, Professor of Population Studies, Stanford University

Jane Goodall PhD DBE, Founder, Jane Goodall Institute, and UN Messenger of Peace.

Professor John Guillebaud Former Co-chair of OPT, Emeritus Professor of Family Planning and Reproductive Health, University College, London.

Susan Hampshire OBE, Actress and population campaigner

Dr James Lovelock CBE FRS Scientist and environmentalist known for proposing the Gaia theory that the Earth functions as an organism, and author of 'The Revenge of Gaia'.

Professor Aubrey Manning OBE, President of the Wildlife Trusts and Emeritus Professor of Natural History, University of Edinburgh

Professor Norman Myers CMG, Visiting Fellow, Green College, Oxford University, and at Universities of Harvard, Cornell, Stanford, California, Michigan and Texas

Sara Parkin OBE, Founder Director and Trustee of Forum for the Future, Director of the Natural Environment Research Council and the Leadership Foundation for Higher Education and Head Teachers into Industry.

Jonathon Porritt CBE, Founder Director of Forum for the Future and former Chair of the UK Sustainable Development Commission.

Sir Crispin Tickell GCMG KCVO, Chancellor of Kent University, Director of the Policy Foresight Programme at the James Martin Institute, Oxford, and former UK Permanent Representative on the United Nations Security Council