Lyft plans to offset carbon emissions from rides to fight climate change

The company plans to achieve this feat by offsetting over a million metric tons of carbon – which Lyft says is the “equivalent to planting tens of millions of trees or taking hundreds of thousands of cars off the road” – in the year ahead. The platform will do this by funding environmental projects to compensate for its own carbon footprint.

According to Lyft, this will be a multi-million dollar investment in the first year alone. The company said this initiative will be an “ongoing commitment” that continues to grow as Lyft does.

“This action is not the full solution, but a real step forward,” Zimmer and Green said in the post. “By committing significant financial resources to these offsets, we’re building into our business a strong incentive to pursue shared rides and the displacement of gasoline-powered vehicles. The more shared rides and clean vehicles on the platform, the fewer carbon offsets we will need to purchase.”

Lyft plans to make its rides carbon-neutral by directly funding emission mitigation efforts, including the reduction of emissions in the automotive manufacturing process, renewable energy programs, forestry projects and the capture of emissions from landfills.

This isn’t Lyft’s first go-round in the green space. One year ago the brand joined We Are Still In, an American network dedicated to tackling climate change and upholding the Paris Agreement. The company also released a list of “climate impact goals” last year, which include reducing CO2 emissions for the US transportation sector as a whole by at least five million tons per year by 2025 and providing at least one billion rides per year using electric autonomous vehicles by 2025.

Last year, the six-year-old service said it provides more than one million rides per day.