It’s a New Year and we wanted to thank our visitors as we look forward to welcoming and helping travelers plan and share trips in the upcoming year.
As we celebrate our 3 months of being online, we want to discuss the impact of travel on the environment. It is a very important theme to us at HowdyFrom, the travel industry overall, and many travelers. It’s a complex subject, but it is one that should not be ignored or glossed over. Tourism (including air travel) accounts for about
5% of the global carbon emissions pie, and even as governments seem unable to come to any kind of a consensus (as seen from the Copenhagen talks), positive change is still possible for the industry.
For a bit of self-reflection: we are an online start-up dedicated to helping people travel smarter. On one hand, we can be seen as encouraging travel, and that is inherently an activity that has a carbon footprint. Additionally, we are a website, and hosting of a website takes an ‘X’ amount of electricity and therefore comes with an additional carbon footprint.
On the other hand, tourism simply is a very important part of our civilization, and has been that way for thousands of years. ‘Tourism’ as well as ‘guides to tourism’ existed even in the ancient times (
Pausanias in the second century AD wrote a travel reflection and guide that survives today). More importantly though, travel as an industry can have a unique and enormous positive impact on the environment. Of course, unrestricted hotel and resort development is very damaging to the environment. However, as we have recently witnessed, preservation is a very important piece in the climate change puzzle. Forests and undeveloped areas function as giant carbon storage areas, hence the attempts to create deals in which wealthy countries pay poorer countries to leave their forested areas alone. Until such a deal happens (and even after that), smartly managed tourism can be hugely important. Sustainable tourism can play take on a role of helping the preservation of forests, wetlands, grasslands, etc… because it does offer a real alternative to logging/unrestricted development.
In addition to creating a library of travel itineraries, we will be working to create more itineraries that focus on sustainable travel options. Please stay tuned. Or please share yours in the meantime on
HowdyFrom.com
To close,
Mashable.com, one of the leading Social Media ‘rags’ (that word in a positive sense) has a nice write-up of how blogs/websites themselves can be more sustainable. As an initial step we are participating in the 350 Brighter Planet Awareness Challenge for Bloggers.
Thank you all and stay tuned!
