Melting glaciers, changing rainy seasons, loss of produce and biodiversity; in Peru the climate change is being felt since many years. Therefore, RESPONS also signed up to Tourism Declares, an initiative that supports tourism businesses, organisations and individuals in declaring a climate emergency and taking purposeful action to reduce their carbon emissions as per the advice from The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) to cut global carbon emissions to 55% below 2017 levels by 2030.
We know of this initiative since the beginning, but due to the pandemic and changes in our blog and website, we have not been able to sign it so far. Also, we believe that there’s much more going on than just the climate change, that tourism businesses should also focus on. Nevertheless, the climate emergency is so real and still so underestimated, that we found it worthwhile to sign this initiative and give it attention. As part of our sustainability philosophy, we have been doing a lot already to bring down our emissions and those of our customers.
Like all signatories, we have committed to the following five actions:
- Develop a ‘Climate Emergency Plan’ within the next 12 months, which sets out our intentions to reduce carbon emissions over the next decade. In our case, this plan already exists as part of our Sustainability Plan that we developed (according to the Travelife Certification alignments).
- Share an initial public declaration of our ‘Climate Emergency Plan’, and update on progress each year.
- Accept current IPCC advice stating the need to cut global carbon emissions to 55% below 2017 levels by 2030 in order to keep the planet within 1.5 degrees of warming. We’ll ensure our ‘Climate Emergency Plan’ represents actions designed to achieve this as a minimum, through delivering transparent, measurable and increasing reductions in the total carbon emissions per customer arising from our operations and the travel services sold by us.
- Encourage our suppliers and partners to make the same declaration; sharing best practice amongst peers; and actively participate in the Tourism Declares community. We have frequent workshops with our most important service providers where sustainability (including climate issues) is always the main subject.
- Advocate for change. We recognise the need for system change across the industry to accelerate a just transition towards carbon-free tourism. Together with our service providers and colleagues in the sector we continuously debate about improvements for the Peruvian sector.
You can find us in the list of companies that declared a Climate Emergency on the Tourism Declares website.
If you have a tourism company, please consider also declaring at www.tourismdeclares.com, and follow @tourismdeclares on Twitter, Facebook or Linkedin. Thanks!
The RESPONS team.
