earth hour, then earth day and beyond!
Intrepid Travel signed up as a 2011 Earth Hour participant and encouraged our staff, followers and fans to join us in switching off for Earth Hour on Saturday, 26 March. Those who captured their Earth Hour moments with a camera went in the running to win one of 3 Lonely Planet Travel Photography books. And the winners were Ebony Jenkin, Malcolm Vella and Tara Kennaway. You can see Tara’s photo of their ‘mystery dips’ get together, where her friends had to guess what they were eating by candlelight 
So just how does Intrepid go “Beyond the Hour and Day?”
We have developed a Carbon Management Plan to help us manage our impact on climate change which sees us measuring all of our emissions – everything from electricity, gas, waste, business travel to paper usage from ALL of our 30 global offices. We adopt efficiency measures such as automatic computer shut off at 8pm for head office staff and use teleconferencing instead of flying around for meetings when possible. We’re reducing the number of business trips we take, reducing the paper we use and waste to land fill we generate. Whatever we can’t avoid, we offset by investing in high quality renewable energy projects that benefit local communities. After all of these measures, our corporate offices produced a low total of 1989 tonnes CO2-e in 2010 Financial Year, which we subsequently offset.
We run low impact trips – through the use of public transport where possible, the use of locally owned and simpler styles of accommodation and locally owned eateries where the food has been locally sourced (therefore reducing food mile emissions).
Most of our Intrepid adventures are Carbon Offset (almost 500 trips). We measure and offset the main sources of trip emissions; transport, accommodation and waste, by adding a carbon offset cost to the price of the trip, per passenger. In the 2010 financial year, we offset 25,000 tonnes of CO2-e emissions of our passenger’s trip footprint – equivalent to taking 5,000 passenger vehicles off the road for an entire year!
