About Temwa

Temwa has been working in remote communities in Northern Malawi for sixteen years. During this time we have planted over a million trees, helped communities to adopt sustainable agricultural practices, and worked to prevent deforestation.

Our new project allows UK organisations and individuals to balance the CO2 emissions of their own activities by supporting work in Malawi, led by local communities and providing genuine benefits to those communities.

We offer community to community carbon balancing, building real connections between the UK and Malawi so that supporters can see how money is spent and the difference it makes to people’s lives. To balance UK carbon emissions, we plant trees, support sustainable agriculture and support sustainable forest management. We measure and evaluate the carbon removed from the atmosphere through these activities, and provide annual reporting and external validation. We want to be fully transparent in our work, and we welcome your input if you have ideas to improve the accuracy of our calculations.

PEMBREE and Temwa

TEMWA calculations for PEMBREE are based on making our products entirely carbon neutral. This is how we’re doing it…

  •  PEMBREE’s factory is already run entirely on ‘green’ electricity, from a supplier who guarantees 100% renewable energy.
  • This leaves the extraction and manufacture of raw materials and the transport of raw materials to the PEMBREE factory in the UK.
  • The energy and CO2 emissions from extraction and manufacture of metals have been widely studied. We used figures from Dartmouth College for the CO2 emissions for aluminium and stainless steel (https://www.dartmouth.edu/~cushman/books/Numbers.html).
  • For emissions from transport, we assumed that all transport was by road; and that components travelled 20% further than the direct road distance in their journeys from manufacturer to PEMBREE. We used the figures for transport emissions provided by ECTA (https://www.ecta.com/resources/Documents/Best%20Practices%20Guidelines/guideline_for_measuring_and_managing_co2.pdf).

We calculated that each pair of pedals is responsible for 28kg of CO2 emissions. You can see the full calculations below. To balance one tonne of CO2, Temwa plants ten trees and carries out a programme of work with local communities to protect existing forests and build soil depth and quality. www.temwa.org