Walking is by its nature a low impact and sustainable activity that authentically connects you with your destination. Our travellers make a choice to take the lowest impact form of travel by choosing a walking holiday, we need to honour that in our operations. We recognise our responsibility to continuously improve, pioneer and drive change for a better planet. Every single step we take has an impact. The challenge is to minimise our negative footprint while maximising opportunities to make a real difference. To give back and empower change.
While sustainability has always been at the heart of everything we do, we have made a commitment to go one step further, measuring and fully carbon offsetting all our operations and trips without passing a surcharge onto our travellers.
See our Climate action page for more details on our actions and goals.
carbon offsets
Climate Positive Hiking Company
That’s our goal, and we’re committed to going beyond achieving net zero carbon emissions. RAW is aiming to achieve ‘Carbon Zero’ by 2024 and go further by becoming climate positive by removing more carbon dioxide from the atmosphere than what we emit we will not just help protect our planet but actively contribute to its recovery and regeneration. We have partnered with Tasman Environmental Markets to support high-quality, third-party-verified carbon offset projects which offer real benefits for local communities. These will offset all the carbon from all our trips and head office operations.
Under our ‘1 walk, 1 tree’ program, we are also planting native trees in Australia for every customer, contributing to local biodiversity programs and the establishment of bio links. Planting trees is proven to be one of the most simple and effective ways we can combat rising C02 levels. 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.
What do we measure?
Our emissions
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: Our vehicles used to transport customers, their luggage. ( RAW Travel no longer has a flights department)
- Scope 2: The electricity we purchase for company operations and office heating/cooling.
- Scope 3: The accommodation we use, meals purchased, documentation produced 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 this is never going to be perfect it is a step in the right direction to become accountable for the travel and activities that we promote.
Carbon offsetting and emissions cuts
Where do we offset?
RAW Travel’s carbon offset programme is aimed at helping protect 600,000 hectares of native rainforest in PNG, whilst also providing solar lighting and boats to local Indigenous villagers so that they can share in the benefits of conserving their rainforest. The massive disruption to travelling caused by the pandemic has meant an unavoidable effect and pause in our offset ambitions which we will resume again later in 2022.
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.