With sustainable travel becoming an ever more ‘hot topic’ for those who love to see the world, it is highly surprising that carbon offset is still such a technical and highly complicated subject. Reducing your carbon footprint is something that most people know, at least something, about: your carbon footprint is ‘the amount of carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere as a result of the activities of a particular individual, organization, or community’ and it can be reduced by changes to your lifestyle to increase your impact on slowing climate change.

Even as I try to learn about carbon creation, and how to offset it, I seem to get deeper into a bog of differing information, technical and scientific arguments and difficult to implement schemes. No wonder so few ‘normal’ travelers want to get involved in such schemes! However, as the world becomes more conscious of the climate emergency that is on our doorstep (and hammering at the door!), changes are coming into place; I was pleased to learn, while researching this blogpost, that Land Rover’s newest Defender includes offsets of production and the first 45,000 miles in its price (although, of course, reading the Land Rover PR bumf vs. actual dissection of just a possible Marketing ploy leads you down yet another rabbit hole….). Yet can the hotel industry be as (if not more) effective?

There are a number of large carbon contributors to a person’s footprint, with the eating of meat and travel (particularly by air) being some of the the highest contributors to emissions. Since our camp is reached by most of our guests by airplane (domestic and local) by visiting our camp, there is a high amount of carbon being created by their travel. Once you arrive at our camp, the first thing to do is to hop into old and ineffective cars (The Safari Series has 2 diesel engines and 5 petrol engines in our Land Rovers) which do little for promoting ourselves as carbon efficient.

With this in mind, I spend a day working out a simple (and not nearly accurate enough…) attempt of how much carbon our guests had created getting to our camp within the whole of 2020. I did this by the following:

Guests coming to our camp: I worked out where the guests came from (country-wise) so if they flew by plane or if they came from within Kenya. I worked out air-miles and/or both road-miles and the carbon related to this using this website. In 2020 alone (of which 40% of it was spent under lockdown) our guests created more than 50 tonnes of carbon. I then worked out (with help from Seedballs Kenya) how many trees would need to grow to adulthood to absorb 50 tonnes of carbon within one year; 1,400 trees. Since if you are just throwing Seedballs (rather than planting in the ground for a higher success rate) their germination rate is 12%. The Safari Series (along with very happy and willing guests) spent Christmas Day throwing a total of 12,000 Seedballs.

Throwing Seedballs on the way to Christmas carols in the bush!

While all good fun, and certainly a way to promote a local, Kenyan brand (another of our Post-Covid Promises!) I felt like the haphazard way we threw the Seedballs did little for actual carbon offsetting, as was the premise of the activity. I want to spend more of 2021 learning and understanding carbon offsetting so that by December I can build on 2020’s attempt and make real action for the betterment of our guest’s visit, promotion of our core values and for the world’s future. After just a small amount of learning while writing this blogpost, I have already learnt the below:

We sell Seedballs at the camp to guests and should be encouraging guests to purchase a bag to throw on their game drives
That organisations like ClimateCare offer you the chance to buy carbon credits - something we could look into doing as a business on behalf of our guests?
Planting a tree seedling for every guest that visits on Lolldaiga Hills could be a more visual way to become carbon neutral / positive (seedlings need looking after however… Donate the money to a local tree planting organisation such as Mount Kenya Trust or newly created Riverine Restoration Project?)

I would value any experience you might have in this field or any ideas on where or what I can learn from - write your comments and ideas below!