Imagine (or maybe you don’t need to) that you hanker after the safari trip of a lifetime in sub-Saharan Africa.
A 17-day tour beginning at the iconic Victoria Falls, passing through Zimbabwe, Zambia, Malawi and Tanzania, taking in some of the continent’s most wildlife-rich national parks, and ending on the lush island of Zanzibar.
It’s just what you’re looking for – now you just need to raid the piggy bank or win the National Lottery.
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The tour is run by an adventure travel group called Intrepid, that offsets the carbon emissions generated by the trip. In this case, that’s 18kg of carbon dioxide (often called CO2 equivalent or CO2e) per person per day, so a grand total of 306kg of CO2e. Great, you think – not just the experience of a lifetime, but a guilt-free one, too.
What is carbon offsetting?
Carbon offsetting schemes allow individuals and businesses to invest in environmental schemes that remove, reduce or avoid emissions that seek to compensate for greenhouse emissions released elsewhere. A common example of this is tree planting. This doesn't prevent emissions from being released at the source.
The carbon offsetting debate
But isn’t offsetting a con, you wonder? An analysis published in 2023, for example, found that 90% of rainforest offset credits approved by the world’s leading certifier were worthless, arguably bringing the whole industry and concept down.
Intrepid, of course, would dispute this. Its global environmental impact manager, Susanne Etti, says Intrepid follows the rigorous Oxford Offsetting Principles and insists that any projects it invests in have benefits beyond carbon removal. “We ask if they provide employment or education, or whether there is a benefit to local biodiversity,” she explains. “Restoring ecosystems is a really big driver for us.”
Previously, Intrepid invested in a lot of wind energy projects, but now it is mainly reforestation, with a particular focus on India and Papua New Guinea. Artificial carbon capture and storage – a more controversial tool in the fight against climate change – is too expensive at the moment, Etti says.
In 2023, Intrepid’s tours generated 105,000 tonnes of CO2e. Though Etti wouldn’t say how much this cost to offset, she indicated that the cost per tonne was between $5-10, an overall offsetting bill of between $0.5-1 million. That’s from the business of nearly 330,000 travellers and on bookings that brought in more than $621 million.
Can you really offset the carbon of a flight?
And what about the emissions associated with your flight from the UK to southern Africa and back again, which Intrepid doesn’t offset? A quick glance at a carbon calculator suggests you’re looking at around 2.4 tonnes of CO2e for the return trip, nearly eight times the footprint of your two-and-a-half- week holiday.
Just for a comparison, it’s worth remembering that the estimated average emissions for people in the UK is around 13 tonnes of CO2e a year. You might be surprised to learn that with a return flight you’ll pump out nearly one fifth of what most of us do in a year. And the global average is around 4 tonnes, so your journey is more than half that. Can you justify it, knowing that human-made climate change caused by the combustion of fossil fuels is a global crisis and one of the greatest threats to wildlife all around the world?
Many airlines now help you to offset carbon emissions from your flight, so perhaps that’s the answer? Or is that just too good to be true, too easy a way to exculpate yourself from the damage you’re causing?
One of the UK's leading ethical tour groups, Responsible Travel, used to offset the carbon generated by their trips, but they stopped back in 2009 precisely because of this. And, as its founder Justin Francis explains, despite numerous negative stories about the ineffectiveness of carbon offsets to do what they claim, this is not the primary reason for not offering them any more.
“The primary reason is it’s a clever marketing idea that perpetuates and enables business as usual,” Francis says. In particular, when it comes to the aviation sector, offsets – he claims – are a “fig leaf” for some really inconvenient truths.
One of these inconvenient truths is that, though every country that has signed up to the Paris Agreement on climate change (which constitutes 196 parties – most of the world, in other words) has a carbon budget or Nationally Determined Contribution (NDC), international aviation is excluded from these targets. This means that, despite efforts to limit greenhouse gas emissions to help the world stay within a 1.5 ̊C temperature rise, those emissions coming from aeroplanes are not counted, disincentivising airlines from taking any action to reduce theirs.
Another is that kerosene – aviation fuel – is one of the few untaxed fossil fuels in the world. As Francis says, “It makes flying artificially cheap, and we are not getting the money back from it that could used in a variety of ways.” In the UK, Francis says this amounts to some £3 billion, cash that could be ringfenced and invested into, for example, researching ways to decarbonise international travel.
So, instead of offsetting emissions from its trips, Responsible Travel looks to reduce them – pressing accommodation to move to renewable energy, switching to more sustainable forms of transport for a trip when they can, and reducing the level of animal-based foods in menus.
And while there’s no getting around those troublesome aviation emissions, consider the fact that wildlife all over the world is dependent on the money brought in by international tourism.
Does tourism benefit wildlife conservation?
Take the famous mountain gorillas of Virunga National Park in Central Africa. In the early 1980s, their population stood at 254 and had been steadily declining during the previous decade. Since then, numbers have more than doubled to 600-plus (and more than 1,000 including those in Bwindi Impenetrable National Park), a conservation success story that has been enabled by the funds and work opportunities created by visitors from all over the world.
It’s not just that former poachers are employed as wildlife guides, it’s that whole communities living around the rainforest where the gorillas live have a stake in their continued survival – people who work in restaurants or hotels, for example. It means that rules about not deforesting the gorillas’ home are more likely to be obeyed. Cutting down trees would be the equivalent of killing the goose that laid the golden eggs.
Justin Francis gives the example of Kenya, where land given over to community wildlife conservation accounts for a huge 12% of the country – national parks are only 11%. “The story we have here is that land under protection for wildlife, communities and carbon sequestration has gone from 11 to 23%, funded in a very large part by tourism,” he says.
Perhaps one day, with the advent of hydrogen or electric planes, aviation will no longer be a substantial emitter of greenhouse gases. For now it undeniably is, but that doesn’t mean you have to shun flying entirely. The fact is 20% of English residents take 70% of all flights abroad, and 1% take almost 20% of them. If you’re not such a frequent flyer, then perhaps that southern African safari isn’t ethically out of reach after all.
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