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ECOCLUB, Issue 92
THE ECOCLUB INTERVIEW
STELLA BELL
Business Development Manager, Climate Care
Ms Stella Bell
has a diverse working background in the City of London, the Travel
industry and the voluntary sector. With an MA in Tourism and Sustainability from the
University of the West of England, she previously worked for an environmental NGO in
Athens. Her day to day work involves selling carbon offsets to businesses and managing
relationships with clients.
Climate Care provides services to help repair the damage human activities do to the
climate. It does this by ‘offsetting’ the greenhouse gas emissions, such as CO2, from a
person’s or company’s activities by reducing an equivalent amount of CO2 on their
behalf. These reductions are made through a range of projects in renewable energy,
energy efficiency and forest restoration, which, it argues, not only fight climate change
but bring benefits to communities round the world. Currently, one can offset emissions
from flying, driving and household energy use. To find out more visit
Please first tell us a few things about your specific responsibility within your organisation, selling carbon offsets to
companies and explain why a company is better off partnering with your organisation, rather than trying to limit or
offset their emissions directly?
I'm the Business Development Manager at Climate Care with particular focus on the Travel industry. I sell offsets to businesses
who, in most cases are making efforts to reduce their carbon footprint and want to offset what remains. We always encourage
companies to offset what they cannot reduce, and fortunately, most of the companies we're dealing with have come to us as part
of a broader strategy to look at the sustainability of their service/product. I would never suggest that it is better to partner with
us than to try to limit emissions, reducing and offsetting should always go hand in hand.
When you're buying a holiday, almost certainly the biggest environmental impact of your trip is going to be the flight, but in a
lot of cases there's no alternative but to fly to get to the destination. We recognise the enormous benefits of travel to destination
economies, but believe that people have to do something to reduce their impact if at all possible and offset what they can't
reduce.
When I went to the Association of British Travel Agents' convention last November in Marbella, for example, I travelled by
train. When you're travelling within Europe, it's possible to do this (although I don't think there are enough financial incentives
to go for the cleaner, greener option). I paid probably what amounted to five times more to travel there than I would have done
if I'd flown, but I believe it's important to fly only when you have to.
Personally, if I travel by plane now (which I don't do lightly), I make sure that I make it a positive action by offsetting the
carrier's average number of empty seats.
There all sorts of objections (or excuses) to carbon-offsetting from right, centre and left. There are the greenhouse
deniers who find no proof that CO2 emissions are causing global warming, some others, who light-heartedly believe that
some global warming is not a bad thing, or that fossil-fuels will some day run out, or technology will evolve and the
problem will be solved. Some have moral problems: a comment in an online BBC forum famously compared it to
"peeing in the swimming pool, but then buying FairTrade biscuits in the cafeteria afterwards". Others suspect that you
may be taking travellers funds away from other charities (and travel charities) serving more pressing needs, such as
poverty-reduction, hunger, disease, human and workers rights abuse. And some in the left believe it is yet one more
capitalist fashionable gimmick for the globalised elites. Others, like planestupid have even set up initiatives calling on
people not to fly at all. If everyone is against you, surely you must be doing something right? And has some of the more
valid criticism actually helped you improve your projects?
I'm glad to say that the debate has now moved away from the greenhouse deniers, and anyone without a massive vested interest
in the status quo accepts that climate change is happening and is human-induced. As you say, fossil fuels will one day run out,
they're not an infinite resource, but there's more than enough under the ground that we can get our hands on to heat the globe to
