Part 2. Stepping Outside the Resort

Leaving Only Footprints...and Smiles!

If we are lucky enough to get the chance, holidays and travelling are often the highlight of the year. Whether it’s the next county or a desert island, time out is important for people who live in some of the most highly stressed and busy countries in the world.

Ethical Travel

Sometimes we want to completely kick back, enjoy a honeymoon, or are too busy skiing the black runs to get into a volunteering holiday. Yet there are plenty of fantastic times to be had which give back to the community without us even noticing! Seeing new places, meeting new people and enjoying the planet are essential to living life to the fullest, but recently ethical awareness has hit the travel scene and cast a shadow over a part of life we shouldn’t be worrying about. So let’s take a moment to demystify the situation.

Location, location, location

Booking through an ethical tour operator can find you a vast choice of vetted destinations, so you don’t need to worry. You can go for a beachfront tree-house in India (my personal favourite – the hammocks were lovely) or go for a high tech version. Either way, ethical accommodation tends to be passionate about: holidaying (good for you); green issues (good for the planet); the location (good for cuisine) and local people (good for local economy).

There are types of tourism that are very destructive to local cultures and environments, and provide very little economic benefit to local people. We want to play our part in helping reinvent this type of tourism. Justin Francis – director and co-founder of Responsible Travel

With standard resorts, little wealth trickles down to the local people but ethical tourism pro-actively generates local jobs and expertise. Large hotels often are built destructively, produce large amount of waste, contaminate water courses and swamp the local population.

Come fly with me…

Location is also important when we consider the environmental cost that our journey makes. Air travel currently accounts for 3-5% of carbon emissions. However it is the fastest growing cause of global warming, and by 2020 is estimated to be the single biggest contributor to global warming (one EU report states that it will be bigger than all the other sources of carbon emissions combined). The intrepid traveller can be intrepid more locally, use alternative transport (train produces 1/8 of the carbon of planes) or count the cost of their flying through compensation schemes.

As we are flying into the Alps for our ski holiday we are contributing to their destruction; our honeymoon flight to the Maldives is slowly sinking it under rising sea levels and destroying coral through bleaching associated with global warming; and finally our safari flight to Africa is contributing to drought, famine and disease. It’s not an appetising thought is it? Justin Francis

I am flying from London to New York in a couple of weeks and used the CO₂ Emissions Calculator to work out the environmental cost of my return flight. It worked out that my share of the flights would generate 1.54 tonnes of carbon (that’s more than the weight of my car). You can use Climate Care to offset the damage. It only cost me £11.55/$20.25 which I viewed as part of the cost of my flight.