User:Bluerasberry/carbon offset

The (insert Wikimedia community group name here) makes the following recommendation, "Wikimedia Community Recommendation for carbon offset".

• 
  No purchase of carbon offset credit 🌡
• 
  Instead fund community programs 👯‍♂️👯‍♀️
• 
  Report emissions ✈

Community recommendations

Whereas

• The Wikimedia community speaks for itself on matters of ethics and values
• The Wikimedia community produces strategic plans, such as for climate change

The Wikimedia community's recommendation is that the Wikimedia Movement...

1. avoid purchasing carbon offset credits
2. fund Wikimedia community programs with money equivalent to the value of carbon offset credits to achieve carbon neutrality
3. produce a report on carbon emissions in the Wikimedia Movement including air travel

Wikimedia carbon offset policy

The Wikimedia Community Recommendation for Carbon Offset is the Wikimedia community's response to the Sustainable Development Goals which describe the need for carbon neutrality as a response to climate change.

In the Wikimedia Movement, the practice is as follows:

1. Calculate carbon emissions
2. Determine the marketplace cost of carbon offset credits
3. Present funding in the amount of that marketplace cost to Wikimedia community projects for producing content related to climate change

This plan differs from the conventional path which most organizations take to achieve sustainability, which is to purchase enough carbon offset credit from a vendor to achieve net zero carbon emissions. In this scheme, the Wikimedia Movement is not carbon neutral, but makes its own claim that the Wikimedia Movement as a special priority to provide information and education about topics including climate change and carbon emissions as its cause. Until and unless the world has sufficient information about climate change to make informed choices, the Wikimedia community must use its scarce resources to make this happen.

What are measurable goals?

This recommendation will be successfully enacted when the following are true:

1. With Wikimedia content development, the Wikimedia community...
   1. identifies about 10 urgent topics in climate change, with a Wikipedia article representing each
   2. improves this information in key languages, including English but perhaps others
   3. Curates supplementary material, including in Wikimedia Commons, Wikidata, Wikisource, and others
   4. translates this information to be accessible and high quality in 10 languages
2. With available data about flight use and energy consumption, the Wikimedia community
   1. produces a conventional report about carbon emissions in the Wikimedia Movement
   2. additionally practices transparency to the Wikimedia community's approval in discussing air travel

Why not buy carbon credit?

The Wikimedia Movement relies on donor funds. If the Wikimedia Movement were to spend money on carbon offsets, we would be giving Wikimedia donor money to the commercial carbon offset market. Such a transfer of money does not take advantage of the Wikimedia Movement strength of access to quality quality information.

Part of the winning strategy for addressing climate change is relying on an informed global population which sees the upcoming climate apocalypse and takes it seriously. While the Wikimedia Movement encourages carbon offsets for almost every other organization, there must be some exceptions for organizations in key roles who otherwise adopt more sustainable practices. Organizations in the Wikimedia Movement merit this exception because Wikipedia is the most requested, published, accessed, and consulted source of information on all topics in climate change in every language.

What are the sources of carbon emissions in the Wikimedia Movement?

estimate of Wikimedia Movement carbon emission sources

The best estimate is that most of the carbon emissions in the Wikimedia Movement come from air travel, and the second cause of emissions is the operations cost of the server which presents the Wikimedia platform and its various computation services.

What about other Wikimedia sustainability practices?

First let's provide general reference information so that everyone can understand the issues, then let's develop additional practices. Anyone with ideas for the next phase can begin drafting the next Wikimedia Community Recommendation.

What reports already exist?

Available information is at Sustainability.