Companies can fund climate work through ClimateCurrent now, under the company terms. For yourself, you can keep your place. The other word on offer, offset, promises a swap we refuse to make. You pay, and your emissions are supposedly cancelled somewhere else. Words on a checkout screen shape what people believe they paid for. Offset invites you to picture a slice of your life wiped clean, and that image is hard to audit.
You have seen the tickbox. It sits under a flight booking, a small green leaf beside a few euros, offering to make the trip carbon neutral before you have chosen a seat. The aircraft burns the same fuel whether you tick it or not. That leaf does a great deal of talking for something so small.
Inside the support
Companies choose their plan and pay for places for their people. The money supports projects that reduce or remove greenhouse-gas emissions, and we report openly on how contributions are used and what they help to achieve.
Companies and the colleagues they invite can take part in the movement. People joining for themselves can keep their place.
The missing certificate
A contribution is no offset of your own emissions. It does not make you, your commute or your weekend in Lisbon climate neutral or carbon neutral, and we will never describe it that way.
We could print a certificate with a decorative border and a tree in the corner. It would look lovely on a fridge door and mean little, because the tonne it named would never belong to you.
Company participation is explained in the company terms. For yourself, keep your place and follow the climate work.
Brussels has views
From 27 September 2026, Member States apply national measures under Directive (EU) 2024/825. Among other changes, the directive adds to the EU list of unfair commercial practices any claim, based on greenhouse-gas offsetting, that a product has a neutral, reduced or positive impact on the environment in terms of greenhouse-gas emissions. It targets the claim. Supporting climate projects remains lawful.
The same directive restricts generic environmental claims made without recognised excellent environmental performance, and sustainability labels that lack a proper certification scheme or public-authority basis. Read together, those changes leave a vague green promise with fewer places to hide. Companies take part in ClimateCurrent under the company terms, and the rules on product claims apply to them whatever we write here.
The ICVCM’s Core Carbon Principles show how much scaffolding a credible carbon credit needs, including additionality, permanence, robust quantification and no double counting. GHG Protocol guidance treats a company’s inventory as its own emissions, and backing work elsewhere does not automatically shrink it. A gift hands you no tonne to retire and no certificate to frame, so there is nothing to dress up as neutrality.
A cautious number you cannot boast about beats a confident one you cannot defend. If that sounds fair, ask to be told the day joining for yourself opens in November. If you came for a neutral badge, we are the wrong shop, and you deserve to know before you contribute.