China Green Carbon Foundation

Dr.Coosje Hoogendoorn, Director General of INBAR

Ladies and gentlemen, colleagues, a very warm welcome here at INBAR for this small ceremony.

Walk the tall-or act in line with your mission. That is the reason why we are together today.

INBAR’s mission is to reduce poverty and to protect the environment by promoting sustainable Bamboo and rattan trade. Increasingly climate change is becoming a part of our environmental program of work.

In 2009, when we were preparing to the big climate change meeting with those flights, and of course with all the other flights that INBAR staff were taking to go to our project sites all over the world. Every trip was putting more and more tons of CO₂ in the air...

So we decided that we needed to do something about that. And we also decided to start with offsetting the CO₂ we produce by flying through a forest, fixing the carbon in a long term manner. We started to calculate for each trip how much CO₂ the trip would produce-fortunately that information is now easily available on-line and with travel agents-and how much it would cost to take that CO₂ out of the air again through planting new trees. When looking for the cost to plant enough trees to off set 1 ton of CO₂, we consulted the China Green Carbon Foundation, one of the first organizations active in China in this field.

And so started the relationship, that today will be reach a new mile stone, through a cheque and an MoU.

We discovered that we share an interest in investigating together in what way bamboo forest can be used to fix CO₂ -hence the MoU that we will sign.

We are also very pleased that can actually transfer the 11000 RMB that we have set aside for compensating for the 61 tons of CO2 produced by our flights, 700000km in the last year, to a special project that the CGCF is running in Lin^,an on bamboo. This is still an experimental project, but we hope and expect that will

Mature soon to a fully developed option also for other organizations, companies and individuals to off the CO2 that they produce in the course of their business.

Ladies and gentlemen, we look forward to an interesting collaboration with the CGCF, that will allow us to really ‘walk the tall and contribute to the creation of a true pro-poor economy.

Thank you for your presence.