When Court Whelan isn’t leading zero-waste adventures through Yellowstone, watching polar bears from a rover in the Canadian Arctic, or taking teachers and curious insect aficionados down to Mexico to watch the migration of some 400 million monarch butterflies, he spends his days counting carbon emissions by the pound.
As the sustainability and conservation travel director for a world leader in sustainable travel, Natural Habitat Adventures, Whelan constantly balances tons of carbon emitted against tons of carbon sequestered.
“I do a lot of calculations for vehicle miles per gallon,” Whelan says. If a group travels by car, he’s keeping track of the distance traveled and gasoline burned. He’ll talk with the captain or supply company if they need a boat to see how much diesel is burned per nautical mile. And, of course, he’s always thinking about air travel. “At the end of the day, the flights are the biggest factor,” he says.
According to the Blue Sky Model, one air mile produces about 53 pounds of carbon dioxide, an open-source estimate of carbon dioxide emissions. It’s ominous when you consider that more than 87,000 flights crisscross this country daily. According to carbonbrief.org, worldwide tourism accounts for 8 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions.
That’s why the Boulder-based Natural Habitat Adventures recently promised to offset all carbon emissions their clients’ air travels produced, saving approximately 450 million pounds of CO2 annually. The company has been offering sustainable travel adventures since 1985. Still, travel with Natural Habitat Adventures to Africa, Asia, or even the Arctic. You can do so with a carbon-clean conscience, knowing that your trip is net-zero from start to finish.
“It’s not cheap, and it’s not easy, but it’s the right way to do it,” Whelan says.
In 2007, Natural Habitat Adventures became the world’s first net-zero travel company, offsetting all of its field and office operations emissions. With this new announcement, Whelan says, the company hopes to inspire others in the travel industry to step up, too.
“What we’re hoping to do is influence the influencers, spread information throughout the industry, and raise the bar,” Whelan says. “If they want to be competitive in this marketplace, truly in a business sense, they’re going to have to do what we do, and that’s what we feel hot and fuzzy about.”
To accomplish this carbon counterbalancing, Natural Habitat Adventures invests carbon credits in three separate sustainability projects scattered worldwide, all where the company hosts exploration programs.
In India, it invests in the Mytrah Wind Power project, which will provide wind energy for three southern Indian states, create 150 jobs, bring clean water to 12,000 people via water plants, and is annually projected to reduce carbon emissions by 479,448 metric tons. In Zimbabwe, it’s investing in a project called Kariba REDD+ Forest Protection, which works to prevent deforestation and land degradation, establishing numerous health clinics in the region and providing 60,250 people with clean drinking water. Then, in Rwanda, Natural Habitat’s investment helped distribute 10,800 efficient cookstoves to communities throughout the region, weaning villagers off of charcoal and firewood cookstoves to improve air quality and prevent deforestation.
“It’s taken a lot of connecting the dots to find the right projects,” Whelan says.
Natural Habitat helps install hydroponic gardens in the Arctic so people can access fresh greens in one of the most ruthless environments on Earth. It’s sponsoring the re-introduction of jaguars and sunbears in Brazil and Borneo. And this July, it’s offering the first-ever zero-waste adventure trip in Yellowstone.
“We’ll be recycling, reusing, reducing, composting, upcycling and terra-cycling everything,” says Whelan, who not only designed the trip but will also be the expedition leader.
With these and other initiatives, Natural Habitat is pushing environmental responsibility to a new level in the travel industry, challenging competitors, peers, and fellow tour agencies to up their game, acknowledging their role in climate change, and doing something to mitigate it.
“It’s not a wildly crazy cost to offset carbon emissions,” Whelan says. “It’s just an investment in our world.”
