Carte Blanche
Responsible Tourism

Carte Blanche is very committed to responsible tourism. We see this as finding the right balance between the demands of holidaymakers and protecting the environment we promote, be this on an environmental, cultural or economic level.

Charities

We are particularly conscious that our work should benefit the local communities. Therefore we support a few (usually up to five to six) local charities in each of our destination countries. These focus primarily on local communities rather than wildlife and for each holiday we arrange to a given country, we make a per person donation to the chosen local charity. Our customers are free to choose whether to donate or not, when they go ahead with the donation then they will receive information about the organisations we support in the areas they are visiting. Our donations go directly to the causes in question and are not spent on administrative activities.

Climate Change and Carbon Offsets

Although the science of climate change, and in particular the impact of aviation emissions, is not yet fully understood, there is increasing recognition that the carbon dioxide (CO2) produced by aircrafts is contributing to climate change. The flights taken by our own team and our travellers, are partly responsible for this.

A typical one way flight to Africa generates about one tonne of CO2 per person travelling.

Carte Blanche will be donating £20 per team member who travels to and from Africa. We’ll give this to verified ‘carbon offset’ projects which are all engaged in activities like tree planting, promoting renewable energy and reducing energy consumption. These will all generate CO2 ‘savings’ which go some way towards balancing out our flight emissions.
We hope that most of our travellers will want to help with this and therefore any invoices that we issue will include this extra £20 per person. This represents the average cost of offsetting a flight to Africa and back to the UK.

Paying this of course, is a matter of personal choice – should any traveller not wish to do so, then they can simply deduct this amount from their final balance.

We know that this effort to offset some of emissions is not a perfect or complete solution, but it’s a start. We are also trying to reduce our office emissions and waste – including turning lights, computers and screens off every night – and although these are small things, when taken together we hope that they will help to make a difference.

We are in the process of finding and following the progress of good projects which we can offset our traveller’s carbon emissions in verifiable way. Our current plan is to contribute our offset donations in 2008 to Tourism Industry Carbon Offset Scheme.

We’ll post here any changes of this policy – and also details of what our travellers and we have together achieved as the months progress.