Organizers of this summer’s Rideau Canal Festival in Ottawa have done the math and found it’s not easy being green.

The Rideau Canal Festival is one of the first Ottawa events to use the carbon calculator at ottawa.zerofootprint.net, a website launched Monday by the City of Ottawa in partnership with Zerofootprint, a non profit organization that focuses on measuring carbon emissions.

The festival, which will feature boating, cycling and heritage events, launches in August to mark the designation of the Canal as a UNESCO World Heritage site. Its organizers pledged in April to make it carbon-neutral and have since run into some unexpected costs of doing so.

Michel Gauthier, the Rideau Canal Festival’s CEO, said carbon-reduction is integrated into every planning and fundraising activity for the festival. He found calculating the festival’s emissions was more complicated than he expected.

“You have to take in everything, so if someone came from Toronto or Windsor or Montreal, they're part of your responsibility, because you attracted them to travel here to Ottawa,” said Gauthier.

Up to 10,000 tonnes of carbon

These expenses have to be worked into the festival’s budget.

It will have to purchase carbon offsets from Zerofootprint, which will plant trees to offset emissions released into the atmosphere. Gauthier estimated that the festival might have to offset 3,000 or 4,000 tonnes of carbon emissions, possibly as many as 10,000.

“When you offset that, depending on what you’re paying per tonne, that could be a lot of money,” he said.

The festival will go on despite these costs, reducing where it can and offsetting where it cannot.

Ottawa.zerofootprint.net is an initiative created by the city to help reduce Ottawa’s greenhouse gas emissions by 20 per cent by 2012.

The city is encouraging individuals and community groups to use the website’s calculator to determine their own carbon footprints, and adopt the suggested methods to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions.