As a field-based organization, whereby all of our staff work remotely, we believe that measuring the carbon emissions of office space is not a priority. We do however intend to measure carbon emissions that are emitted from working from home, and travel related to our activities.

We also intend to work with our community partners to support them to measure their carbon emissions and develop inclusive, accessible and realistic action plans that will aim to decarbonize their operations as much as possible.

The majority of our community partners, being community-based and operating on a local level with a focus on creating socio-economic and environmental impacts, tend to have very low carbon footprints.

Our action plan to mitigate emissions related to travel has been / will be based on reducing instances of fossil fuel-powered travel where possible, and where it will not adversely affect the quality of our work. These reductions will be monitored by using science-based decarbonization targets and tracked by continuously measuring our carbon footprint for the foreseeable future.

 A large part of our staff travel is made by field staff who visit community partners for training, capacity building and coaching/mentorship activities. The majority of our community partners have limited connectivity and therefore it is necessary to visit them in their location to enable impact.

All of our internal meetings and a large majority of our meetings with strategic and corporate partners are conducted online. We will endeavour to improve the climate impacts of our use of online meetings by choosing platforms that, in turn, aim to mitigate the climate impact of their servers.

We will continue to prioritize meetings online, and if staff are required to travel to conferences, we will ensure that the trip also has additional reasons that contribute positively to us achieving our organizational goal of uplifting community tourism enterprises to improve the resilience and well-being of their communities.

Planeterra has been working on developing a new initiative that will provide practical solutions to the climate-biodiversity crisis, working in close collaboration with community, strategic and corporate partners.

We have developed a tree-growing initiative that focuses on the direct benefits that trees have for communities, rather than the mainstream focus of carbon offsets. Benefits for communities are wide-ranging, such as improved soil health and crop yield via sustainable agroforestry activities, mitigating natural disasters (e.g. flooding, drought, landslides) and desertification, improved water and food security via the sustainable harvest of non-timber forest products (NTFPs) and by improving the health of watersheds and aquifers, and general well-being that comes from improving humanity’s relationship with nature.

Rural and indigenous communities, in particular stand to suffer from climate change and biodiversity loss, and therefore Planeterra endeavours to restore landscapes while improving community well-being and resilience to the impacts of climate change.

This tree-growing programme will aim to provide tangible options to travel companies to mitigate the impacts of the climate-biodiversity crisis whilst improving community resilience and well-being, regenerating biodiversity and protecting ecosystems.

This programme is part of a broader climate-biodiversity crisis response initiative that aims to support community tourism enterprises to innovate climate-biodiversity crisis solutions that complement their tourism products and services.

Planeterra is partnering with tourism companies to finance our Climate-Biodiversity initiative. We believe that the potential for scalable social and environmental impact of this initiative is huge.

We have also started to work with third-party organizations to explore the possibilities of communities we are working with to access financial incentives – such as carbon finance and biodiversity credits – that will contribute to improving community well-being and can be reinvested into the innovation of other climate-biodiversity solutions and community tourism enterprises. This, in turn, can multiply the initiatives’ impacts.

Planeterra aims, to develop partnerships with tourism companies and third-party organizations to leverage resources with the goal of improving the impacts of our operations on climate, biodiversity and people.