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 from 2024 without passing a surcharge onto our travellers.
See our Climate action page for more details on our actions and goals.
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 of other 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
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 carbon offsetting is far from perfect and the main aim is still to reduce emissions, it is a step in the right direction to become accountable for the travel and activities that we promote.