project costs

An offset produced by World Land Trust costs £15. This covers all project requirements, typically including:

• Land purchase for permanent incorporation in a nature reserve;
• Purchase of seedlings from local, often family-run, nurseries;
• Land preparation, planting and maintenance costs;
• Other silvicultural work;
• Exclusion of livestock;
• Forest protection, including equipment and infrastructure;
• Field staff and training;
• Monitoring, combined with education and research programmes;
• Project administration costs for the local partner organisation.
  

This work is maintained through the project life-time and beyond, each project site being given over to permanent conservation management. Actual costs vary from place to place and the £15 price is an average. World Land Trust selects sites according to their biodiversity conservation importance, not cheapness of offsets, and the price therefore allows it to include initiatives in challenging areas with high project costs, as well as ‘easier’ targets.

The World Land Trust is a non-profit organisation and any difference between offsets income and expenditure is simply reinvested in more project work, usually used for the protection of standing forest. It reserves 15% of the offset price for its own administration, but keeps these costs to a minimum. Again, any excess at the end of the year is reinvested in actions meeting the WLT conservation mission.