There are lots of things you can do to reduce your carbon footprint - cycling or using public transport, insulating your home, turning your heating down or using energy efficient light bulbs.

For those emissions you cannot reduce, you can offset them with our Gold Standard Offset Scheme.

Upon submitting your details for this scheme, you will be referred to myclimate's external website, where your carbon offset donation will be processed. Please note, Virgin Atlantic Airways is not responsible for the content of external internet sites. If you experience any issues whilst on myclimate's website please contact myclimate by clicking here.

You can also offset your emissions onboard with us, when you purchase your duty free goods!

1. It's Gold Standard

The daddy of all the offsetting standards, with backing from everyone and their dog including lots of environmental groups, Gold Standard methodology was created to facilitate the move from fossil fuels to renewable energies.

Your money will go directly to a project which has immediate positive impact, both on the local communities and the environment. This does mean that our scheme is slightly more expensive than some others out there, but that's because it's that good.

Read about our current projects and see what difference we've made already...

2. 85% of Your Donation Goes Directly to the Projects

It was really important to us that as much of your money as possible would go direct to the projects in this scheme, and not to a middle man somewhere for twiddling his thumbs. 85% is one of the highest guarantees around on this, and we have our fantastic partners myclimate to thank for that, who work tirelessly to make this margin as small as possible. The remaining 15% is spent by myclimate on administration including payment processing.

3. It's a good assessment of the environmental impacts

We worked out exactly how much carbon our aircraft were producing on each of our routes, and had this independantly verified. We then worked out how much this would equate to for each passneger by taking into account the different weights of equipment and seats in each different class of travel, and also the amount of cargo on each route. Some schemes use averages and don't distinguish between the different classes of travel. We thought it fairer to be more accurate. You can also chose to input a multiplier in the scheme if you want to take into account the lesser understood non - C02 effects, which many environment groups recommend you do, but DEFRA do not recommend. For more details.

4. It's not like kicking your dog

There have been lots of claims in the press that offsetting is like giving a donation to the RSPCA and then going home and kicking your dog. We don't think that offsetting is hypocritical if it's done in conjunction with sound emissions reductions (it's also a good way to understand your footprint better). We believe reducing emissions is our responsibility (together with other industry players and governments) and that is why we have committed to reducing our carbon emissions by 21,000 tonnes by the end of this financial year, and to improving our fuel efficiency by 30% by 2020. We have also made some suggestions as to how you could reduce your footprint which we hope will at least get you thinking. Oh and please look after your dog.