A new carbon reduction scheme has been launched in Moray to help businesses, individuals and visitors offset their greenhouse gas emissions.
The Findhorn Foundation hopes is asking for small donations to help it support eco-friendly projects in developing countries.
Those include supplying cookstoves to Kenya that do not require the burning of wood or charcoal to operate and installing wind turbines in western India.
It is estimated that 4,000 people visit Findhorn from locations across the globe every year and the foundation has opened a website that can calculate the greenhouse gas emitted by every journey to the village, whether by air, rail or road.
And the foundation is asking visitors to consider donating to sustainability projects in order to cancel out the extra carbon dioxide their trip has added to the atmosphere.
Paul Dickinson, executive chairman of the carbon disclosure project, said: “The Findhorn Foundation has for decades been a pioneer of ecological responsibility.
”People from across the world want to visit this magical place, but they are naturally concerned about the emissions from travel.”
While Findhorn has a small ”ecological footprint” due to the use of renewable energy and water recycling systems, the foundation says the village’s carbon consumption is in line with the UK average.
It is hoping to ”lead by example” with the offsetting scheme, in order to further reduce its carbon footprint and encourage others elsewhere to look into similar initiatives.
Mr Dickinson added: ”One way to take action directly is to offset our carbon emissions.
”That means balancing our emissions by investing in projects that store an equal amount of carbon in trees, protect forests from being cut down or projects that replace fossil fuels with renewable energies.”
The organisation will hold its own climate change conference in April 2019, with an eclectic range of interesting and high profile speakers.
They will include an Eskimo elder, a teenage activist currently suing the US government and one of the planners behind the 2015 Paris climate accord.
For more information on the foundation and its projects, visit
findhorn.org/carbon-offsetting
.