Last Year We Declared a Climate Emergency: Here’s What We’re Doing About It

Here at The Inside Trek, we firmly believe that our type of small scale, positive impact tourism looks after the land and nature that we’re lucky enough to walk amongst, while also providing real and positive social exchanges for our guests and our community.  But when you’re in the travel industry, there’s an even greater responsibility than to just look after your local neighbourhood.  

#TourismDeclares

Because we are all in the midst of a climate and biodiversity emergency.  Current IPCC advice tells us that, by 2030, we need to cut global CO2 emissions to at least 55% below what they were in 2017, to keep the planet within 1.5 degrees of warming, with even that level of warming having substantial impacts.  And like all travel companies, we’re implicated because we encourage both travel and consumption, two things that contribute hugely to CO2 emissions. So small scale and local isn’t enough.

We need to be thinking big when it comes to the challenge presented by CO2 emissions. And that’s why in the spring of 2020 we signed up to the Tourism Declares initiative. That’s why we declared a Climate Emergency. That’s why we joined the ever-increasing movement of travel companies committing to putting in place a Climate Emergency Action Plan to significantly reduce our carbon emissions.

The Inside Trek’s Climate Action Plan

This is our 2021 Tourism Declares Climate Action Plan. This plan is in split into three main areas: understand, reduce, and persuade.  It sets out what we’re going to do to help the current climate crisis, by cutting the carbon emissions we have any control over, and by encouraging others to do likewise.  Every year we’ll update this plan to provide a transparent assessment of our progress over the year just gone, and include our goals for the next year and beyond.  Because there is no alternative.

Understand

You can’t take action on something you’re not looking at and trying to understand. So we’ve spent a lot of time looking hard at our business, to analyse what negative impacts it has and then understand what we do to try to mitigate those impacts.  

What we’ve done

Understanding the sources of our CO2 emissions is the fundamental platform every business needs to be able to then go about doing something about its climate impacts.  From our analysis of our business activities, we identified the following key sources of CO2 emissions:

• The car journeys we need to make to carry out our trips
• The make-up of our multi-day experiences – as each active day requires much more travel and consumption than compared to a rest day full of R&R
• The food and pack miles for the things we have to buy for our trips – the further they have to travel, the more CO2 they emit
• The manufacturing process for the things we have to buy – as new things need power to make them and power means CO2, especially when they’re made of plastic (given that it comes from fossil fuels, requires huge amounts of power to make it, and is non-biodegradable)

How we’re using this understanding is set out in the next section.

Targets for next year and beyond

If you want to really dig deep into a topic, you need to properly measure it.  And so to take our efforts to the next level, we need to start measuring our carbon footprint in much greater detail.  Our future targets in that regard include:

• Producing a carbon footprint analysis for each of our trips, including includes an estimate of all local transport, accommodation, activities, guides, staff and office operations, and food
• Producing a carbon footprint analysis for our internal operations
• Openly sharing the method by which we produce those analyses, in the hope other companies will be able to more easily follow suit

Reduce

Pretty much everything has an existing carbon footprint which can therefore targeted for reduction. In setting up The Inside Trek, we worked hard to build in as many best practices and ways of working that we could to reduce our carbon footprint, and we don’t intend to rest on this going forward.

What we’ve done

• Upgraded our car to more efficient second-hand car – save for visits to Belfast where public transport can be used from our nearest town, we do need to use a car for the majority of our internal transport, as Northern Ireland’s public transport network is not particularly comprehensive or frequent.  But while a car is inevitable, the level of its CO2 emissions aren’t. So, in December 2019, we reduced our upgraded the efficiency of our car, via a new second hand car (we believe new cars require too many virgin resources to be justified), resulting in a 44.3% increase in fuel efficiency and a reduction of 22.4% in CO2 emissions
• Reduced average speed by 5 mph – how you use a vehicle is just as important as how efficiently that vehicle drives. Partly spurred by COVID causing us all to slow down, we started driving at 5 mph slower, which increased our previous fuel economy by 14% (yep, we were surprised it was that much too!).  Saving us money and helping the planet. Everyone should do this, in our view.
• Added rest days into our multi-day experiences – we love hiking & Northern Ireland and we want all of our guests to love both of them to. Which is why all of the multi-day experiences we initially published were rather hiking heavy! But we have now changed that to add in more varied multi-day experiences, incorporating more rest and lower activity days. This is both to provide variety to our guests, and much needed R&R for their legs, and to enable them to see much more of what our wee country has to offer. But in doing so, it also reduces the amount of CO2 emitted from that trip, as less driving is needed for those rest and lower activity days.
• Continued to reduce our plastics usage – plastic comes from fossil fuels, requires huge amounts of power to make it, and is non-biodegrable. Yes, its extremely versatile. But we really don’t like it, and are trying hard to reduce our usage of it. Thankfully, we’re greatly helped in that by our amazing local refill store, The Larder, where we now source all of our coffee, eggs, oils, re-useable sandwich bags, nuts, pulses, and any other products we can think of. Every single purchase we make from The Larder is at least one piece of plastic less than we would otherwise have used.  And across a full year, we reckon that’s at least 300 individual pieces of plastic.
• Continued to buy local brands from local providers wherever possible – we also use local produce, items and ingredients as much as possible throughout our experiences, both because they’re great quality, but also to ensure that the air miles behind everything we eat and use are at a minimum.  That means as much of our food as possible comes from The Larder of course, while the vast majority of the hiking gear we have for both our team and our guests come from Outdoor Adventures NI, our local outdoors supplier who we’re proud to have help us make sure our guests are kitted out with the best brands, all from as close to us as we can (for example, brilliant UK brand Berghaus). 

Targets for next year and beyond

• Instal car electric charging point at our base location – yes, the big climate win here is the next point (an electric car). But an electric car isn’t much use if you can’t charge it, and a charging point is something we can financially do much more quickly than the car itself.  Plus we also know that if we have a charging point, it will give us even greater encouragement to go ahead and get the car. So this is top of our list for the next 12 months.  
• Upgrade car to hybrid or full electric (whenever money and vehicle offerings permit) – our car journeys are by far and away the biggest source of our CO2 emissions. So of COURSE our ultimate aim is to have an electric vehicle, powered off of renewable energy sources (hybrids don’t make sense for the long distance A road & motorway journeys we mostly take, as the weight of the combination of both a petrol engine and electric batteries wipe out a lot of the benefits that that combination can bring). Now, we’re a wee bit away from being able to buy any electric car at this minute.  First up, we’re not in the financial position to change up to the size of electric vehicle we would need.  Secondly, given the relative infancy of fully electric vehicles, there are very few options that have the functionality we need in terms of size and capability, while the few available options are brand new (and therefore expensive & resource intensive). So, while we’re not proud of having a diesel car at the minute, given that the most sustainable purchase you can make is none at all, we’ll keep driving the one we’ve got (5 mph slower than we used to) unless and until we’re in a position to get the perfect second hand electric upgrade to our current car (we believe new cars require too many virgin resources to be justified).
• Protect, renovate and repair as much as we can – another brilliant sustainable thing to do is to keep using the existing stuff that we’ve got for as long as possible. So unless it is size-related, we’re aiming to try to avoid buying any new equipment unless we absolutely have to, instead renovating and repairing our existing equipment to extend their working life as far as possible.  
• Incorporate public transport into our new adventures – that’s particularly the case with regards to focusing on train journeys, to reduce the reliance on cars and private buses. Now that’s not easy in Northern Ireland, as we’ve already said. But that doesn’t mean we can just stop trying.  If we see an opportunity to make this happen, we want to take it.
• Supported Those Partners Harnessing Renewable Energy – while Northern Ireland may not be renowned for the sun, we plan to actively look for accommodation partners who use solar energy to heat their water (although there is disappointingly low take up of this option so far by local providers).

In short, we will always try to make the best choices we are able to where we have direct influence over carbon impact.

Persuade

As we said above, we are ALL in the midst of a climate and biodiversity emergency. So what we do isn’t enough. We need as many businesses and people as possible to be taking action on their CO2 emissions and climate impact, too.  So we need to working out persuading others to join us in this cause.

What we’ve done

We’ll be honest with you. We’ve not done anything on this leg of our action plan so far. This far, in our first year of operation, we have really had no option than to focus on building our own business to be as best as we can.  So the only persuasive thing we’ve done is to encourage our multi-day guests to avoid air travel where possible by applying a ‘green discount’ for those arriving by ferry from the mainland United Kingdom, while, for guests arriving into Dublin Airport arrivals, we both reduce the price accordingly – and apply a further ‘green discount’ – if they take the AirCoach service to Belfast. 

This is the area that we have the most to do going forward. And we’re intent on doing that.

Targets for next year and beyond

We are keen to encourage our suppliers and partners to adopt more sustainable practices, in particular around further adoption of renewable energy sources, alternatives to locally-sourced products and produce, and single-use plastics.  In particular, we are keen to open a dialogue about sustainability with the many amazing hotels in Northern Ireland that don’t currently have any mention of the environment on their website or brochures at all. We think they’re both missing a trick when it comes to differentiating themselves, and missing the urgency of the Climate Emergency. 

Whenever we see the opportunity, we will share best practice amongst our peers and competitors.  And our ultimate wish list would be for all partners we work with to have also published transparent climate action plans.

Give Us Your Thoughts

As a travel company we know we’re encouraging people to flying round the world to come spend time with us. So we recognise that, just by publishing this policy, we’re opening ourselves up to accusations of greenwashing.  It’s therefore our responsibility to engage with the challenges we face head on and we’re absolutely up for that.  If you have suggestions or insights that can help us improve, just email me at andrew@theinsidetrek.com anytime, especially as our plans are evolving continuously based on learning and sharing.

We don’t claim to know all the answers. But as we go, we’ll transparently share our progress and our learnings in the hope others will learn from our mistakes. We’ll talk openly, invite criticism and collaborate with partners and competitors alike. And we won’t exaggerate the effects of what we’re doing, Only by being honest do we have a chance of getting to our goal, not just as a company, but as a society.

Right, enough talk. Time for action

Andrew Magowan
Founder