Carbon Offsets To Alleviate Poverty (COTAP.org)

Carbon Offsets To Alleviate Poverty (www.COTAP.org) is an early-stage nonprofit whose mission is to empower individuals in developed countries to simultaneously tackle two of the world's biggest challenges: climate change and extreme poverty. Cotap will transparently match individuals’ carbon offset purchases to forestry projects in least developed countries. Cotap’s goal is to become a prominent funding catalyst for the forestry carbon market for the purposes of transferring unprecedented wealth to the most economically disadvantaged people on earth, restoring landscapes, and resolving the forestry carbon finance gap. With a dual mission that puts poverty alleviation on an equal footing with CO2 abatement, Cotap will become a unique crowd-sourced funding model which complements existing poverty solutions involving loans, grants, matched savings, and guarantees. Cotap aims to eventually catalyze millions of dollars in verified annual wages to hundreds of thousands of villagers who currently live on $1 per day, as well as hundreds of thousands of planted trees representing millions of tons of validated and sequestered carbon dioxide.