Declaration of a Climate Emergency

Adventure Tours UK Declares a Climate Emergency

Adventure Tours UK was founded in 2018, amidst a growing concern for the state of our environment and the huge impact we now know industry has on climate change. That impact can be negative or it can be positive. For many legacy businesses this impact is negative and it will take huge efforts over a period of time to turn those ships around.

Because Adventure Tours UK was born from a time where knowledge of climate change and environmental impacts were well documented. And because as the co-founding individuals we have always been people who care deeply for our natural world, we are proud to have created an adventure travel company that has set out to be truly responsible from the very beginning. Tourism is a big contributor to greenhouse emissions, but we have responsible tourism in our DNA. We always have and always will, strive to deliver tourism responsibly and sustainably.

Declaring our Support for the Climate Crisis

In early 2020, we joined the Tourism Declares a Climate Emergency movement, alongside a growing number of other forward-thinking travel companies.

Following that, by the end of 2021 we had also signed the Glasgow Declaration shortly after COP26. This was the next step for us on our sustainability journey. We believe it is crucial for all businesses to take positive action and the Glasgow Declaration is a united front for tourism businesses representing the fight against climate change.

By joining the Glasgow Declaration, we committed to:

• Supporting the global commitment to halve emissions by 2030 and reach Net Zero as soon as possible before 2050
• Updating our climate action plans in the next 12 months and publicly report on our progress annually
• Aligning our plans with the five pathways of the Declaration (measure, decarbonise, regenerate, collaborate, finance) to accelerate and co-ordinate climate action in tourism
• Working in a collaborative spirit, sharing good practices and solutions and encouraging others to become signatories

Climate Emergency Plan

Our Climate Emergency Plan focuses on:

• Further cutting carbon emissions, in line with current advice from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, stating that by 2030 we need to cut global carbon emissions to 55% below their 2017 levels to keep the planet within 1.5 degrees of warming
• Working collaboratively with partners, suppliers and competitors to share best practice and grow the community
• Advocating change across the industry and calling for urgent regulatory action to accelerate the transition towards zero carbon air travel

This will further strengthen the Responsible Travel Policy we already have in place.

Carbon Impact Report

Our vision is for a world where everyone can travel with a smaller and smaller carbon footprint each year. We’ve created a roadmap to do it and we’re proud of every step we’ve taken so far on this journey.

In June 2022, we were delighted to publish our first Carbon Impact Report and in June 2023 we published our second annual report, when we were delighted to reveal we had exceeded our emission reduction target.

We want to be completely transparent with each guest who travels with us, so we will continue to share our progress with you through our annual carbon reports. We are proud to have worked with carbon consultancy e-collective to calculate and manage our carbon footprint since 2019.

Working together

We’re not perfect and we recognise that as a travel business we are part of the problem. We all are, in some way. But we recognise where we have a negative impact and we are taking significant steps to counter it.

As we continue to grow, we believe we can do even more to not just protect our environment, but to actually help it to recover. And there is more to consider, including the wellbeing of our employees, governance of our supply chain and support of our local communities. All are equally critical to building a fairer world and so an important stage of our journey was to gain B Corp certification in March 2023.

We welcome you to share in this journey alongside us. Together we can achieve great things. Together we can make our world a better place.