If you had a choice between a five-day kayaking trip along Sweden’s Saint Anna
Archipelago
and five days paddling along the Pelion Peninsula in
Greece,
which would you choose? Would being able to clearly see that the trip in Sweden
has an average carbon footprint of 48kg per person (including all local
transportation, accommodation, food, activities, guides, staff, and office
operations) while the one in Greece is 220kg per person influence your decision?
Carbon labels on food
products and
menus
started making news in 2020. A natural extension of nutrition labels, they
contain information about carbon emissions and occasionally other supply chain
details. Now the concept has been adapted for the tourism industry — where a
growing number of companies are measuring and publicizing the carbon emissions
created on their tours, like those for the paddling trips in Sweden and Greece.
“Because it’s quite a new thing, I wouldn’t say there are a lot of people going
out looking for it right now; but I think that will change,” said Claire
Copeman, co-founder of Adventure Tours UK,
which publishes carbon emissions alongside departure dates and trip duration.
“At the moment, when people do see it, it’s an extra bonus. It’s like, ‘well,
this trip looks great and I can see that it’s low impact,’ and they like
that.”
For Adventure Tours UK, sharing carbon emissions online with other relevant trip
information is just one of the ways it engages with travelers about the climate
crisis and environmental challenges. The company also has a carbon-mitigation
program that strategically plants one tree per traveler in its local area of
Northeast Wales, in partnership with the Clwydian Range and Dee Valley Area
of Outstanding Natural
Beauty. When the company’s
tour leaders actively talk about these carbon-mitigation strategies on trips,
Copeman said travelers are genuinely excited.
“Because we’ve measured the carbon in the first place, we know the footprint, we
know the tree is doing more than it needs to, and there’s a tangible tree at the
end, it helps people understand the whole process a bit. For some people, it’s
not a gamechanger for them. It’s just interesting to know,” she said. “But for
others, there’s a real genuine feeling of ‘I’m playing my part by traveling with
this company.’”
Most travelers don’t understand what carbon emissions are or how to make sense
of them in the tourism
context.
Yet more travelers are becoming more conscious consumers, so education is a key
reason tour companies are publishing carbon labels with their itineraries.
Perhaps more importantly, these publicly shared labels hold travel companies
accountable for measuring, sharing and continuing to reduce their carbon
emissions.
“The marketing team knows how much its website traffic has increased by exact
percentages. The finance team obviously knows about revenue. The customer
service team knows if the average review has gone up from 4.2 to 4.4 stars. But
there’s been a lack of a numbers-based approach to sustainability,” said
Charlie Cotton, founder of ecollective,
which helps travel companies measure and reduce their carbon footprint. “When it
comes to sustainability, no one is perfect,” he said, but measuring carbon
emissions is required as a benchmark so that companies can begin reducing them.
Measuring carbon emissions is not simple, however; and tourism’s supply chains
are particularly complex. In addition to calculating office and staff
operations, tour companies must work with dozens of partners — including
accommodation, transportation, food, and activity providers — to calculate
carbon emissions for a single
itinerary.
“In theory, we should be at a stage where you should be able to contact your
suppliers and get this information, but that’s not where we’re at,” Cotton said.
“Instead, when you contact your quad-biking supplier in Dubai, they’ve got
no idea what the carbon footprint is per trip.” Every time this happens, a tour
company needs to work with that singular supplier to help it determine its
carbon emissions, which makes carbon measurement the most challenging part of
publishing carbon labels.
Recognizing this complexity, Much Better
Adventures not only published carbon
labels for all of its trips in February of this year, but called on all tour
companies to do the
same
and made its methodology
available:
“Our hope is that by releasing both our measurements and the methodology we
used, it will encourage other companies to more easily follow suit, and build on
what we’ve done so far,” the company notes in its documentation.
ecollective’s approach is to make the measurement process as easy and as quick
as possible, getting as much data as possible to calculate a fairly accurate
benchmark score without getting too bogged down in details that keep tour
companies from taking any action. “We want to get to the reduction side and
start making reductions that we know will be quantifiable and verifiable and
actually make a difference,” Cotton said.
The few tour companies publishing labels have only been doing so for less than a
year. Given the pandemic pause, it’s hard to say whether these labels will sway
decision-making for travelers. However, consumers are increasingly skeptical of
companies that may be
greenwashing;
and clearly labeling carbon emissions is a transparent and objective way of
communicating environmental commitments.
More importantly, measuring and publicly sharing the carbon footprint of trips
is motivating companies to actively find ways to reduce emissions even further.
Adventure Tours UK, for example, is currently working with partners to make
improvements throughout the supply chain and considering changes to some of its
itineraries so that more nights are spent at low-energy accommodations and less
time is spent driving.
“Everything we do has a carbon footprint,” Cotton said. “But, as a business, you
want to be able to tell a customer, ‘This is our carbon footprint. You know we
have one. We know we have one. But we’re going to address the elephant in the
room, and we have a plan in place to make sure that year on year, we’re going to
make sure our carbon footprint is going to get smaller and smaller.’”
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JoAnna Haugen is a writer, speaker and solutions advocate who has worked in the travel and tourism industry for her entire career. She is also the founder of Rooted — a solutions platform at the intersection of sustainable tourism, social impact and storytelling. A returned US Peace Corps volunteer, international election observer and intrepid traveler, JoAnna helps tourism professionals decolonize travel and support sustainability using strategic communication skills.
Published Oct 26, 2021 8am EDT / 5am PDT / 1pm BST / 2pm CEST