The mission of Carbon Offsets To Alleviate Poverty (www.COTAP.org) is to empower individuals in developed countries to simultaneously fight both global poverty and climate change by connecting their carbon footprints with certified forestry projects in least-developed countries which create life-changing income for the world's poorest people.

The Problems Hundreds of millions of people live in rural areas of developing countries on less than $2 per day. This is the poverty level which forces people to make hard choices between food, health care, and education, and where an estimated 11 million children die every year. Many such communities are not good fits for traditional microfinance, which tends to be urban, and they are also disconnected from markets for which they could produce physical goods. Meanwhile, tree planting programs have proven potential for reaching such communities and for creating measurable economic benefits for them. A very promising way to finance such activities is through carbon offsets, but existing carbon market currently only quantify and pay for the carbon commodity part of the equation, which is only half of this story. Further, carbon offsets from tree planting programs are issued relatively slowly, are small relative to necessary amount of up-front investment, and entail a variety of unique yet manageable risks. There is thus a forestry carbon financing gap, one which COTAP views as an unacceptable market failure given forestry carbon projects� ability to reach and empower the world�s most vulnerable populations. Our Solution COTAP sources carbon offset funds from individuals who care about both climate change and global poverty. We then match those funds to accredited forestry projects in order to restore landscapes and create measurable and lasting benefits for the most economically vulnerable people in the world. COTAP aims to annually catalyze tens of millions of dollars in wages to hundreds of thousands of villagers who live on less than $2 per day.  COTAP will create a new system whereby the world�s most vulnerable perform the service of counteracting the unavoidable carbon footprint of individuals in developed countries. This will not be simple, easy, or quick, so we invite you to join us in this challenging, worthwhile movement to make tomorrow brighter.