Kagumu Adventures Declares a Climate Emergency

Kagumu declares a climate emergency.

Since beginning in 2015, we have remained steadfast in our desire to use responsible tourism as a way to inspire people to live, work and travel more responsibly. This has not changed and will never change.

Unlike most agencies and operators, we began with these values. We didn’t begin to create trips. We didn’t start with an aim to sell online courses and deliver some positive impact where we could.

We began working to teach people about sustainable development and we use the beautiful tool of travel to do this.

One of our main aims when starting was to measure everything. Our social, economic and environmental impart. This would then tell us if we were actually working towards a sustainable future.

Regarding the latter we recognise the negative impacts travel has on the world and thus we truly believe Tourism Declares an Emergency is essential. We are delighted to join the many other companies working in travel that have signed this declaration and as well as agreeing with all the declaration points mentioned here, we have our own strategy.

So what are we doing?

Working to a Climate Action Plan

During the Covid pandemic we revamped our climate action plan to include carbon emission data for activity relating to the day-to-day running of Kagumu and most importantly, the emissions relating to the travel of our visitors.

This means we calculate, using the GHG Standard, emissions from domestic flights, in-country transport, accommodation and even the International flights of our visitors.

As well as giving clients the ability to see estimated carbon emissions from each educational trip or virtual experience, we have identified how we can lower our carbon emissions and where we need to offset them by donating to vetted projects like Tomorrow’s Air and Environomica. You can read more about our Climate Action Plan here.

Aligning ourselves with the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)

Our internal sustainable development officer, Bernie, is charged with measuring our internal impact and ensure we stick to our mission of: lowering our environmental impact to the fullest extent while increasing our social impact.

We measure our progress with thorough impact reports that we publish online and in our newsletter.

Additionally, we work with projects, organisations and companies with a similar mission and that are working to impact the goals themselves.

Educating young people about the SDGs

Our mission is to educate young people about sustainable development and inspire them to take positive actions in the own community. This impacts directly on SDG Goal 4 and indicator 4.7:

Target 4.7 by 2030 ensure all learners acquire knowledge and skills needed to promote sustainable development, including among others through education for sustainable development and sustainable lifestyles, human rights, gender equality, promotion of a culture of peace and non-violence, global citizenship, and appreciation of cultural diversity and of culture’s contribution to sustainable development.

We achieve this through our SDG-aligned educational trips in Latin America and expert-led SDG webinars.

Striving to be better

One of our core values is for staying relevant.

What we mean by this is that we are flexible to future changes, especially regarding Climate Change and carbon emissions. We have a business model that can change with the future landscape. This could mean adopting new models like Doughnut economics, circular economy etc.

We also strive to do better in our day-to-day operations. Look for more responsible providers, measuring our carbon footprint in more depth, investigating our carbon offsets partners and much more.

As we are an educational travel operator, we also want our stakeholders to be better. We do this by asking our travellers to compensate extra for their flight emissions, give them a responsible traveller pack, and asking them to pledge to continually travel with a responsible mindset.

To learn more about our responsible tourism practices, contact us by clicking here.