Green Lotto Games

The Carbon Lottery is the worlds first green lottery where a £2 ticket buys you a 100kg carbon offset and enters you into a draw to win €4m! Your £2 ticket effectively is invested in a suite of 6 renewable energy projects that help tackle climate change and bring real benefits to the local communities.

It is one of the most innovative carbon-off setting programs in the world and has been set up by investor group and carbon offset experts Sterling Waterford and agency Splinter Media. The Carbon Lottery was created to help carbon offsetting fulfill its potential by providing a simple, rewarding and engaging way of encouraging people to offset their unavoidable carbon emissions. Currently, carbon offsetting is seen as a costly punitive tax, almost a grudge purchase. The Carbon Lottery aims to address this perception through harnessing a culturally accepted mechanism, the lottery, to reward people for offsetting and hopes to radically increase the amount of offsetting done in the UK.

Over half of the ticket price goes to providing the prize pool to pay out the Lottery prizes and the remainder goes into the cost of sourcing, assessing, negotiating and purchasing the best community-based offset credits across the globe which help to tackle climate change. Of course a small allocation is also set aside to run, operate and market the Lottery. The projects range from a wind farm in Turkey to renewable energy community projects in Guatemala and Brazil, and small hydro installations in India. Each ticket offsets 100kg of Carbon Dioxide as well as entering the player into the draw for both the big jackpot prize as well as smaller cash prizes.

The initiative was developed in response to the low take-up of carbon offsetting among businesses and high levels of confusion about the role of offsetting for consumers. Current figures suggest that just 5% of the UK public offsets their emission and less than 0.1 per cent of emissions from the UK's 100 largest firms are voluntarily offset.