Reducing Carbon

From providing a sustainable income to local people living in wildlife-rich areas, to creating advocates for species conservation, we believe wildlife travel is a force for good for both the traveller and the destination. However, like everything, holidays have a carbon footprint. It is our responsibility to minimise this impact, not just for this year, but every year to come.

We've measured the total carbon footprint of our business operation - including our headquarters, tour operations, customer flights and business travel - and we're now on a mission to reduce it year on year. Right now we don't have all the answers, nor are we claiming to be perfect, but each year we will strive to improve.

We calculate our carbon footprint annually in collaboration with the specialist carbon consultancy ecollective. We first measured our total carbon footprint in 2023: this is our baseline year.

In 2023, our total carbon footprint was 13,385 tonnes of CO2e. The average carbon footprint per customer per day was 220kg of CO2e.

For all of our tours, we include carbon measurements for:

• Accommodation
• Transport – both international and internal flights, all driving, trains, buses and even cable cars in the Alps!
• Activities and excursions – such as safari drives, zodiac cruises. A lot of what we do is exploring on foot with our binoculars, but we still include any driving we might do to reach our destination each day
• All meals included in the tour price – this is typically based on ‘high meat content’ which has the highest carbon footprint, except for certain tours like those in our vegetarian/vegan portfolio.
• Tour leaders and local guides, including flight emissions for our UK based leaders and their participation in the tour

We have also calculated the carbon footprint of running our business, which includes our head office emissions, staff commutes, business travel, marketing materials and website, post, hosted events… even our annual Christmas dinner!

We’ve carbon labelled every one of our tours. Nearly everything we do causes carbon emissions, and therefore has a carbon footprint; the label tell us what that footprint is. We have chosen to do this so that our clients can make an informed decision when they choose their next holiday. We’ve also calculated our overall carbon footprint so that we can measure our progress year-on-year, working to both reduce our footprint and offset our emissions through our Naturetrek Reserves projects.

We've now calculated our footprint for three years. Our carbon footprint increased from our baseline year by 28% in the second year, which was not the direction we wanted it to be going in! There were many reasons for this: for example, we have most control over the smallest part of our footprint (Naturetrek’s HQ makes up just 1% of our total footprint), the growth of the business, clients travelling further afield in a post-pandemic world, and our operation of a cruise to Antarctica (which we only do, by way of a full wildlife charter, every three years or so). The reduction in carbon efficiency in 2025 was great to see, though it was in large part due to a change in the standard flight emissions calculation factor*. We know that we still have far to go, and we're committed to continual improvement and total transparency along the way.

• We have partnered with Byway to offer our clients the option to travel by train to many of our European tours, now advertised on 60+ tour pages (plus many more on request).
• We regularly launch new British tours and day trips (26 during the course of 2025!) as part of our mission to continuously boost our portfolio of flight-free holidays.
• We calculate the carbon footprint for every single tour that we offer and display this on our tour pages to help our clients make informed choices about their travel plans.
• In 2025, we collectively improved our commutes to the Naturetrek office with more car sharing and cycling, reducing our commuting carbon footprint below our 2023 baseline! We've subsequently introduced an EV scheme for our office team.

We have also estimated Naturetrek’s lifetime carbon emissions from 1987 to 2024. We estimated this to be 202,203 tonnes**.

An interesting discovery: The (tentative) estimate of the tonnes of carbon stored in our combined Ecuador reserves is between 106,000 and 212,000 tonnes*** – the upper ‘carbon retention’ estimate being a very similar figure to our lifetime emissions.

*This was due to updates to DEFRA flight emissions figures which are used in our calculations. DEFRA figures for 2023/4 had been based on COVID occupancy rates (and, since very few people flew in 2021/22, this meant the CO2e per person was incorrectly high as many more people flew in 2023/4). In 2025, DEFRA reverted back to data not impacted by COVID.
**Lifetime carbon emissions for Naturetrek 1987-2022, and annual carbon emissions thereafter, calculated in collaboration with the specialist carbon consultancy ecollective.
*** Tentative carbon retention estimates for the Naturetrek reserves in Ecuador provided by Fundación EcoMinga.