The Wilderness Group Institutes Carbon Labelling in their Adventure Traveler itineraries
Based on past statistics, the tourism industry is responsible for 80% of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions, indicating the industry’s huge carbon footprint. After the pandemic lockdowns showed how nature reacted to the significant absence of human activities, travel businesses are now making changes in their itineraries. The award-winning Wilderness Group for one, announced it will now include Carbon Labeling across all their 156 itineraries from England, Scotland, and Ireland,
The so-called Carbon Labeling approach provides their guests with transparency about the carbon impact they create when traveling. The purpose of which is to show carbon contribution calculations to help them arrive at informed decisions when planning their travels.
How Carbon Labelling Will Work in Reducing Tpurism Industry’s Carbon Footprint
The Wilderness Group believes that tourism can have a positive impact on the planet, to communities, and down to individuals. The group is actually the first adventure travel group to ever create such approach in traveling.
Similar to how every food packaging has nutritional information, each of their adventure itinerary now comes with a carbon score that shows the number of carbon in kilograms is contributed by every trip. It is assumed that there is an average of 142kg CO2 for every traveler per wilderness adventure trip, which is much less compared to the 445kg CO2 contributed by a Caribbean cruise on a daily basis.
The labels are based on information gathered after analyzing the carbon footprint of more than 5,000 travel services including activities, transport, accomodation, and food.
The group’s carbon reduction strategy involves the complete use of electricity with their vehicles, further partnerships with low carbon restaurants and accommodation, and fresh product designs to reduce carbon emissions.
According to CEO and founder of The Wilderness Group, Paul Easto, they want to assist their consumers in making better travel choices. More than that, they are also encouraging the whole travel and tourism industry in making carbon labels a standard, alongside the different prices and dates of travel during holidays.
Carbon Labeling is actually a key component to the Wilderness Group’s attempt to reach true net zero by year 2030. For the next decade, they plan to reduce 90% of greenhouse gas emission as well as focus their investments on long-term carbon removal on their estate in Highland, by partnering with Trees for Life.
