responsibletravel.com to remove carbon offsetting

It’s a real shame that an industry leader in responsible tourism should move so completely away from offering offsets as this potentially leaves a gaping hole in a wider engagement process and risks driving businesses and consumers away from doing anything at all.

ABTA set up Reduce My Footprint (www.reducemyfootprint.travel) with the aim of giving the travelling public as well as the industry an opportunity to do something around the carbon reduction agenda. In fact we do have a carbon calculator at the core of RMF but it is very much pitched as part of a hierarchy of ‘avoid-reduce-replace-offset’. We worked with the industry and organisations such as Forum for the Future and Manchester Metropolitan University to put together the RMF scheme.

What we’ve tried to do is make it clear to consumers and businesses that everything we do in our lives has an impact on the environment – washing, heating, lighting, driving, shopping, flying etc. In almost all of these areas there are things we can do here and now to avoid or reduce reliance on fossil fuels and lower our individual emissions (and save money!) And in some areas the opportunities to replace fossil fuel energy reliance with alternatives are increasing all the time.

What we are left with, in particular the flying bit of our travel choices, provides few options to consumers. We certainly don’t believe that simply encouraging people to pay for absolution is going to change any consumer or company behaviour. But that’s not what we offer with RMF and not why we offer it. Currently some of the money goes into offset projects (certified and verified) but for us the important element is the amount that goes into destination projects – some of which are about reducing carbon and others are about improving economics and livelihoods. It's this important element of contributing to the kind of destinations they may well go to on holiday that resonates with consumers. So, calculating the carbon and contributing to projects that optimise the benefits our travel decisions bring to destinations and to projects that reduce carbon, should be part of that engagement process. RMF is not perfect, but one thing it certainly isn't is a carbon offsetting scheme.

It is also our responsibility as ABTA to provide all sorts of engagement tools. RMF now sits alongside a number of other initiatives such as Travelife (www.its4travel.com) which is designed to encourage tour operators to make informed decisions about their suppliers (largely hotels at present) and also give suppliers the facts and incentives to perform more efficiently (and carbon reduction is part of that) and also engage more closely with local communities. We have also just launched the results of stage one of Tourism 2023 - our strategic future-proofing work with Forum for the Future. We have developed four plausible scenarios and a shared vision. So far we have ABTA, The Travel Founcation, TUI, Thomas Cook, The Co-operative Travel, Carnival UK, BA, Sunvil and Advantage Travel Centres signed up. The report is at http://www.forumforthefuture.org/projects/tourism-2023

Of course one of the travel industry’s priorities must be to reduce carbon emissions and we share some of the concerns about offsetting and its role in an increasingly regulated carbon trading environment. But not all the tools in this arena are about paying for guilt. RMF remains a very potent tool for engaging consumers.