An Update on Our Carbon Reduction and Climate Action Projects

At NorthStar we believe the long-term sustainability of our planet is crucial. NorthStar is therefore committed to being a ‘climate friendly’ company. We offset a significant proportion of our carbon footprint by removing greenhouse gas emissions from the global environment. We fund the planting of trees every month and help finance a number of important climate action projects around the world.

We have partnered with Ecologi, one of the UK’s leading environmental organisations to help us achieve this commitment. We achieve this commitment in three key ways:

• Employee Carbon Footprint Offset Scheme. Every member of our team is climate friendly. This means we offset a significant proportion of our carbon footprint, including emissions from all business activities as well as employees homes, personal travel, holidays, food, hobbies and more.
• Business Travel Reduction & Offset Scheme. We are committed to minimising business travel wherever possible but some business trips are unavoidable. That’s why we offset our business travel by planting trees and financing carbon reduction projects around the world.
• Planting Trees & Funding Climate Projects. We help fund the world’s best climate crisis solutions. Every month we help finance a number of climate action projects and contribute funding to ensure the planting of groves of trees in our company forest.

Since we started our partnership with Ecologi, we have funded the planting of 383 trees, offset 24.5 tonnes of carbon and helped fund numerous climate action projects. Here are a few of the projects we have helped fund in recent months:

Protecting old-growth rainforest in Peru

The Brazil nut (Bertholletia Excelsa) tree is one of the largest and longest-lived trees found in the Amazon – they can grow up to 50m high, and live for over 500 years. Brazil nuts are notable for their rich content of vitamins and minerals, and this makes them an important and valuable non-timber forest product, and their passive harvesting provides a way to generate income from a tropical forest without destroying it. The Brazil nut concessions project supports the community to produce reliable income through this passive harvesting. This incentivises the protection of the forest and its carbon sinking capabilities, since Brazil nut trees can only be found in old-growth forests. The project has also built a new processing facility, expanding a formerly subsistence activity into a viable income source. Additionally, the community receive carbon finance income generated by the protection of the rainforest. Visible through careful additional monitoring, there are good indicators that the project has so far been a success in its goal of protecting the rainforest from degradation and deforestation. There has been little evidence of disturbance to the biomass (such as illegal logging) within the project boundary, and carbon storage per hectare has also increased since the project began in 2010. Incorporated within the project activity is an outreach programme to help local communities understand the benefits of keeping the rainforest intact, including the benefits to the climate and to safeguarding threatened and endangered species.

Protecting lowland peat forest in Indonesia

The Rimba Raya REDD+ project protects 64,500 hectares of lowland peat swamp forest from conversion to oil palm plantations. The project area is in Central Kalimantan province, on the Southern coast of Borneo. This area is incredibly rich in biodiversity, including being home to the endangered Bornean orangutan. Provincial government in the area had previously slated the project area for conversion into four palm oil estates, and the project activity prevents this from taking place – ensuring the continued survival of the natural habitat for over 120 threatened and endangered species, and keeping the carbon stored in the trees and peatland locked away. The project is the largest in the world to protect High Conservation Value (HCV) tropical lowland peat swamp, making enormous emissions reductions and protecting many species on the IUCN Red List. It is estimated to reduce over 3.5 million tonnes of emissions per year through preventing the clearing of the peatland. Rimba Raya is also the first project supported by Ecologi to be certified by Verra’s Sustainable Development Verified Impact Standard (SDVista). This standard carefully scrutinises projects for their impacts toward the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The project’s SDVista Validation Reports (which can be found here) note substantial contributions to all 17 of the SDGs. These impacts come through various aspects of the project activity: from distributing solar lanterns to 1,794 local households, to providing sustainability education to 346 local students, to the building of two fire lookout towers on the project site to ensure rapid response to potential fire risks within the project boundary.

First Ever Wind Power Project in Honduras

This project, consisting of 51 2MW wind turbines, generating 345,970MWh of energy every year, which will be put into the National Interconnected System of Honduras. The turbines started producing energy in 2011, with the operational lifetime of the project expected to be at least 20 years. Honduras aims to be producing 60% of its energy from renewable sources by 2022, and this project is playing an important role in reaching that goal. The project is preventing the emission of 226,978 tonnes of CO2e every year it is operational by replacing energy in the national grid generated from burning fossil fuels with energy from wind power. In addition, 57,000 trees have been planted over 34 acres around the project site, including 10,000 Quercus Purulhana which is a species of oak that is native to Central America, and is classified as vulnerable by The International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN). During the construction of the project, almost 500 local people were employed, and now 32 local people are employed full time by the project, providing a stable income for the employees and their families. Furthermore, access to clean water for around 2,000 local people was improved by the project in 2014 when three water wells were drilled.

Cleaner cookstoves in Zambia and Ghana

We are supporting two cookstoves projects concurrently: the Toyola project in Ghana, and the 3 Rocks project in Zambia, to help reduce greenhouse gas emissions and support local families. Toyola: This project replaces carbon-intensive charcoal stoves with fuel-efficient insulated stoves, known as the Toyola Coalpot, across Ghana. These ‘coalpots’ are 33% more fuel-efficient than traditional cooking methods and significantly reduce charcoal consumption – reducing both air pollution and decreasing the amount of biomass required. 3 Rock: This project replaces ‘three rock’ fires in the home with cleaner stoves, which dramatically cut annual biomass usage – by up to 66%. The stoves consist of a durable metal alloy liner, enclosed in brick with a galvanised cooking surface and a directed flame. Across both projects, for each use of an improved cookstove which replaces the use of a traditional cookstove, greenhouse emissions are avoided. Communities also benefit from lower fuel costs, reduced exposure to damaging pollutants, faster cooking and increased cleanliness and convenience in the home. In addition, the reduced volume of biomass required for cooking eases pressure on natural sources like forests.

Producing energy from waste rice husks in India

This small project involves the implementation of a 5MW cogeneration power project powered by waste rice husks. The project is designed to meet growing electricity demands as local manufacturing infrastructure develops, without producing increases in fossil fuel energy usage. Rice husks are the hard protective covering of grains of rice that are discarded when rice is harvested. The rice husks are transported from the nearby rice mills in the region to the project site, and are combusted in a boiler. The combustion produces high-pressure steam which is used to turn a turbine, which drives a generator to produce electricity. The electricity produced helps to meet energy demands, and replaces electricity that would otherwise come from the largely coal-powered NEWNE (India’s integrated Northern, Eastern, Western, North-Eastern) grid. Whilst biomass power and waste-to-energy solutions are often considered ‘bridge’ solutions, small projects like this one help to provide funding for sustainable development – as well as producing emissions reductions like the projected 28,442t CO2e annual reductions from this project.

Preserving Amazonian rainforest in Brazil

The objective of this Brazilian Amazon REDD project is to avoid emissions from planned deforestation on a property in Para State, in the Eastern Amazon of Brazil. The property includes five forest areas: Rio Capim, Poty, Cauaxi, Sumal and Caculé, totaling over 200,000 hectares. This project will preserve 27,434.9 hectares of native forest within the site, which had previously been designated for deforestation in order to clear the land for livestock pasture. Instead of being deforested this area of rainforest will be conserved. It is estimated that the project activity will avoid over 9.4 million tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions over 10 years – which would have been emitted in the absence of the project. Additionally, through this project the land owners have committed to intensifying and improving their practices to support the sustainable social development, maintenance and improvement of biodiversity. This work will involve the maintenance and/or enhancement of long-term social and economic well-being of forest workers and local communities, the reduction of the environmental impact of logging activities, and the maintenance of the ecological functions and integrity of the forest.

To view more details about our partnership with Ecologi and how we are helping fund tree planting and carbon reduction projects, please view our Ecologi profile.