Sustainable travel company Natural Habitat Adventures is pairing up with the World Wildlife Fund to take travelers to remote locations threatened by global warming. The tours visit Greenland, the Arctic, and the Amazon and aim to raise awareness and create more advocates for the environment.
A partnership between Natural Habitat Adventures, a leading conservation travel company, and the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) takes eco-conscious travelers to locations threatened by climate change while allowing them to offset their carbon footprint for an entire year.
The Climate Change & Our Wild World program provides travelers with a first-hand view of three locations that are seeing the worst impacts of the climate crisis: Greenland, the Arctic, and the Amazon.
The poles are the epicenter of the climate crisis, with temperatures in the Arctic expected to increase 4 degrees Celsius (7.2 Fahrenheit) over the next 50 years, at least twice the global average. Meanwhile the Amazon rainforest, one of the Earth’s most diverse ecosystems, is suffering from climate-fueled wildfires and deforestation.
The first tour of 2025, slated for August, will take travelers to the virtually uninhabited and rarely visited east coast of Greenland, allowing them to witness how the melting of the Greenland ice sheet is accelerating due to man-made climate change, contributing to sea level rise.
In early November, the Arctic tour will explore the Canadian north, where the shrinking ice cover is pushing polar bears toward extinction. This time of the year sees the highest concentration of polar bears near the outpost town of Churchill, Manitoba, as they gather for the start of their winter hunting season.
The Amazon trip that starts in late November will explore the river’s headwaters in the Pacaya Samiria Reserve, a 5-million-acre wildlife sanctuary on the eastern flank of the Andes that is home to pink river dolphins, scarlet macaws, sloths, and monk saki monkeys.
In recent years, traveling to areas threatened by the climate crisis has taken off, triggering a trend known as “last chance tourism,” which sometimes leads to overtourism and contributes to environmental degradation due to the carbon footprint associated with traveling.
But Nat Hab and WWF have taken strides to reduce the environmental impact of their trips while offering travelers a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to advance their understanding of the climate crisis. For example, groups typically average 10 people and feature leading conservationists, mostly from WWF, who give presentations and engage in daily discussions with tour members.
“The beauty is that they provide excellent info both on a general level, but also insight that few have access to or will seek themselves, due to the very complicated and multi-layered nature of climate work,” Court Whelan, chief sustainability officer for Nat Hab, told Travel + Leisure.
“I truly feel that these trips are generating the next round of climate advocates, with people emerging from the trip as more informed, inspired, and ready to pursue and advocate for solutions than most people in the world,” Whelan said.
In addition, Nat Hab has designed a comprehensive program to offset emissions stemming from the tours that provides funding to green energy, emissions reductions, and forest conservation initiatives in countries hard-hit by the climate crisis, such as Ethiopia, Indonesia, and India.
To avoid “greenwashing,” Nat Hab selects projects that are vetted through third party verification and prioritizes initiatives that seek to advance UN Sustainable Development goals.
“This way, we feel like we’re doing the most good, while making sure the offsets are extremely valid and meaningful,” Whelan said.
The company estimates that these collaborations offset 40 metric tons of emissions for each traveler in the Climate Change & Our Wild World program, more than twice the average annual carbon footprint of people living in the U.S., which is at 16 metric tons.
“Our main focus when offsetting is probably more to raise awareness about emissions and the ability to offset, to hopefully educate and perhaps even instigate travelers to look into offsetting in their own lives,” Whelan added.
