Walking, by its nature, is a low impact and sustainable activity that authentically connects you with your destination. Our travellers choose to take the lowest impact form of travel by choosing a walking holiday, we strive to honour that in our operations.
RAW is a responsible corporate citizen and we walk the talk: we pay good wages, treat all our loyal suppliers fairly, always pay all our taxes on time (hello, big end of town!) and aim to genuinely contribute to our local community and environment, raising over $18m for Charities since we started. We recognise our responsibility to continuously improve, pioneer and drive change for a better planet. Every single step we take has an impact.
While sustainability has always been at the heart of everything we do the ongoing challenge is to reduce and minimise our impact footprint while maximising opportunities to make a real difference in local communities. To give back and empower change, being a positive role model for the new way of doing business, where all stakeholders benefit. See our Climate action page for more details on our actions and goals.
Business as a force for good
Certified B- Corp
Since 2019 we have been proud to be certified as a member of the growing B-Corp movement, using business as a way to produce positive social and environmental outcomes. As a B-Corp you are assessed on five impact areas( Governance, Workers, Community, Environment and Customers) and approx 250 questions as a part of your rigorous certification process.
We dropped our longstanding ‘Advanced Eco – Certification‘ in favour of this newer B-Corp standard which is much more holistic, harder to achieve and maintain. In an era of rampant greenwashing, it’s important the public can have confidence in company’s claims and certifications. Verified by B Lab, the not-for-profit behind the B Corp movement, the achievement demonstrates that RAW Travel meets high standards of social and environmental performance, transparency, and accountability alongside a commitment to goals beyond shareholder value and profit.
Read more about B-Corps
Tackling Ocean Plastics
Cleanhub partnership
Plastic in our oceans has rightly caught public attention in recent years as it is a growing problem and a serious threat to wildlife and our environment. While we used to focus our attention on doing beach cleans ups we have now partnered with a very effective scheme – Cleanhub – that aims to help alleviate plastic pollution at its source in one of the world’s most affected places: our neighbour Indonesia.
We have committed funds to remove 5000kg of ocean-bound trash each year, which is collected in Indonesia, weighed and then re-used as fuel in the production of cement (which has a heavy carbon footprint). This novel scheme provides verified fair wages to people in local communities in Indonesia and provides a grassroots solution where lack of local waste schemes means a lot of plastic trash often ends up in water courses and the ocean, washing up on our Northern beaches.
Read more about the wonderful work that Cleanhub does in Indonesia and other countries.
Re-wilding the Planet
Tree Planting & Climate impacts
Under our ‘1 walk, 1 tree’ program, we are planting native trees in Australia for every customer, contributing to local biodiversity programs and the establishment of bio-link corridors of green. As David Attenborough has said planting trees has proven to be one of the most simple and effective ways we can combat rising C02 levels and increase bio-diversity back to our planet. We have volunteer days where we plant trees ourselves with a local ‘Landcare’ group and also sponsor the growing and planting thousands of local trees each year with the Tree Project.
As part of our climate-positive commitment, we are a founding signatory of Tourism declares a network of leading travel companies and individuals around the world coming together to declare a climate emergency. For those of you who would like further details on which activities we measure we have a climate action page that outlines how we aim to make emissions cuts.
What do we measure?
Our emissions
Our primary drive should be to always reduce our impacts as the priority, then carbon offsets can be a useful tool for those impacts that cannot be reduced. Greenhouse gas emissions are categorised into three groups or ‘Scopes’ by the most widely-used international accounting tool, the Greenhouse Gas (GHG) Protocol. So in our case this equates to:
- Scope 1: Any vehicles and trains used to transport customers, their luggage.
- Scope 2: The electricity we purchase for home office heating/cooling. (Our main office now runs off Solar Panels)
- Scope 3: The accommodation we use, meals purchased, luggage transfers involved to support a trip.
We look to actively reduce emissions where we have control over the process or product and/or offset for emissions produced when we don’t control the source of emissions: such as with our suppliers the hotels and baggage transport companies. We take an annual audit of our estimated carbon offsets and then pay for the carbon offsets to match these emissions. Whilst carbon offsetting is proving far from perfect and the main aim should still be to reduce emissions, it is a step in the right direction to become accountable for the travel and activities that we promote.