Update: Green Upgrades - Eco Tourism

Eco Tourism offers easy ways for consumers to act in an environmentally friendly way without changing their behavior.

Trend Description:
Since traveling has become a mass cultural phenomenon and it has become easy for almost everybody to visit the most remote parts of our planet, it seems even more important, to travel eco-friendly. We already reported about how consumers are becoming more and more aware of the importance to protect earth’s sustainability, and how companies are now trying to find alternative marketing strategies (please read our blog entry Green Upgrades). Now we collected some more case studies, which show how companies can make it easy for consumers to neutralize the pollution they produce. Especially the tourism-sector offers a huge variety of Green Upgrades, of Carbon Offsetting.

Cases:

Sustainable Travel International
Sustainable Travel International (STI) is a not-for-profit organization, dedicated to providing education and outreach services that will lessen the toll that travel and tourism takes on the environment and local cultures. They especially help travelers and travel providers to offset their climate impacts from air and land travel by using MyClimateâ„¢ carbon offset tickets, but also shows ways to protect the environmental, socio-cultural and economic needs of the places they visit, and the planet at large. STI works together with a variety of Carbon Offset and Green Tag projects all over the world. STI provides a huge database of clean energy projects and eco- friendly tourism destinations and businesses.

Ecoventura
Ecoventura is an adventure tourism company in the Galapagos Islands. It is the first company in South Amercia, that has achieved CarbonNeutral status. Ecoventura works with The CarbonNeutral Company and participates in the Smart Voyager environmental certification program to ensure the preservation of the Galapagos National Park. Each year Ecoventura carries Thousands of tourists to the Islands, which are recognized as a “living laboratory of evolution.” Despite the thriving travel business Ecoventura was able to achieve CarbonNeutral status by reducing carbon dioxide emissions and offsetting the remaining unavoidable emissions.

Expedia and TerraPass
Air travel is a major source of the greenhouse gas emissions. According to TerraPass a single cross-country plane flight burns about 100 gallons of fuel per passenger. That’s as much as most people use in four months of driving. Thanks to the partnership of Expedia and TerraPass tourists can now offset the amount of greenhouse gas emissions, which was created by their plane flight. TerraPass provides Expedia-Customers with a flight emissions calculator. Passengers just have to type in starting point and destination and are told what amount of carbon dioxide they have to offset and how much this would cost. Right now the TerraPass members fund supports a variety of projects, like a wind facility in Ainsworth, Nebraska or the Chicago Climate Exchange. Passengers who offset a certain amount of emissions receive a luggage-tag identifying them as “Green Flyers”.

Trend Impact:
Although many types of offset are difficult to verify, the idea of Carbon Offsetting is becoming more and more popular. Many providers now obtain certification, to show that their offsets are accurately measured.
Despite that, many environmentalists have criticized the use of forestry carbon offsets (one of the cheapest possibilities) as an inadequate substitute. Their concern arises from the fact that the emissions, which were offset by the newly planted trees will be again released as CO2 when the tree dies and decays. The reason there is enough oxygen, is that oxygen producing plankton (and plants) in the ocean are often covered in mud and decay without consuming oxygen in a process called sublimation (source: Wikipedia). But despite this criticism we will see a growing number of partnerships between the travel industry and environmental organizations. Carbon Offsetting is a very comprehensible way for consumers who want to help protecting the environment. And by buying into Green Upgrades, consumers can also set themselves apart from the masses. Certainly they soon will receive other little gadgets like the TerrPass luggage tag to which identify them as especially environmentally conscious.

Sustainable Travel International

Ecoventura

Expedia and TerraPass

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