Indigenous and forest people in East Africa helping with carbon offsetting. Photo Credit: Carbon Tanzania
Forest carbon offsets - which aim to improve how a forest is managed
and increase its carbon storage - can be an excellent way to drive
finance to protect forests. They can also help to convert energy systems
in those countries that do not have the finances to do so, thus
contributing to different forms of carbon emissions reduction. These
ideas were shared by Sustainable Travel International during a recent
webinar examining the impact of travel on global carbon emissions. It
looked at how forest carbon offsets can contribute to net zero policies,
how this works in practice and whether they could be causing more harm
than good.
It was suggested that by visiting forested areas that are not typical
tourism hotspots, the travel industry can help to meet the economic
needs of communities in those areas, to help fund their ongoing
protection.
Sustainable Travel International is an organisation that aims to
protect and conserve the most vulnerable destinations by transforming
tourism’s impact on nature and people. It featured contributions from
social enterprise Carbon Tanzania. The latter currently protects over
5,000 sq km of natural forest in East Africa, which it claimed has
helped to prevent the emissions of over 850,000 metric tonnes of CO2
each year.
Tanzania as a destination
“People who visit Tanzania are fortunate to see beautiful game parks
and some forests, but they're not seeing huge areas,” said Jo Anderson,
director of finance and sales at Carbon Tanzania. “There are much bigger
areas covered in forests across Tanzania that are never even seen or
visited by tourists. It’s these areas that are in the stewardship of
local people, communities and indigenous people where deforestation is
the biggest threat. There aren't any tourists going there to provide
revenue.”
Anderson added that the tourism industry offers a fulcrum. “It gives
us a leverage point. We were able to say to tour companies that if you
want to do something good for forest conservation, if you want to do
something that supports real nature conservation, and contributes to
climate mitigation, this would be a great mechanism for your
travellers.”
Watching out for the good and the bad
As the webinar outlined, it is important to have an external critique
of the forest carbon offset process, to identify whether ‘there are
potentially bad actors in the space’.
Marc Baker, CEO of Carbon Tanzania said: “We do not have a solution
to flying around the world and not producing carbon emissions. We don't
have that solution on the table - it’s quite a long way away. Offsetting
is valid, but it needs to be done well and we need to get better at
it.”
Sustainable Travel International has partnered with various meeting planners, such as Internova Travel Group and Reuters Events.
During the pandemic, Internova saw the exponential growth in demand
for practical resources to support carbon offsetting goals, and chose
Sustainable Travel International in 2022 to share expertise in
sustainability education, carbon calculation and reporting. Clients have
access to target-setting consultation, tools and certified carbon
offset options for climate-protection projects.
New developments
Sustainable Travel International CEO, Paloma Zapata, said that the
organisation is developing several initiatives for the meetings
industry, including the development of technology solutions to support
stakeholders in calculating their travel emissions, such as
transactional tools to enable buying offsets from carbon projects. The
platform delivers real-time pricing, the current allocation of the
portfolio (an index fund of carbon projects that gives buyers exposure
to a range of carbon offset types), the issuance of certificates, and
the retirement of carbon certificates where buyers “retire” the
certificates after purchase.
An event carbon footprinting tool is also available for MICE buyers,
which calculates corporate event emissions, including venue energy
consumption, meals, and attendee travel and accommodation. Results
provide the carbon footprint of the event and the cost to make it carbon
neutral through carbon offsets.
Links with the island Pacific nations
Zapata added that the organisation is also working with over 100
destinations across the globe, focusing primarily on small islands and
protected areas, that possess rich yet sensitive natural and cultural
resources, and where tourism is the leading driver of GDP, to help raise
awareness of sustainable travel. In APAC, this has included working
with the Pacific nations of Palau, Fiji, and Samoa.
“We partnered with the South Pacific Tourism Organisation to help
regional hotels adopt more sustainable habits,” said Zapata. “Many small
islands in the region share similar sustainability challenges,
including limited resources, increased vulnerability to climate change,
and insufficient waste infrastructure. Hotel participants received
training and guidance on improved resource efficiency as part of this
programme.”
Sustainable Travel International also developed a monitoring system
specifically tailored for the South Pacific region that allows hotels to
track their resource consumption and identify opportunities for
continual improvement.