Ecotourism

Account for your programs’ travel emissions and support eco-projects in your host communities.

We all need to understand, reduce and account for our environmental impacts and ecotourism offers great opportunities to combat climate change, especially in relation to participants’ unavoidable travel emissions. “Neutralizing” these emissions through purchasing carbon offsets, however, has a slew of challenges and offsets have often been compared to guilty “indulgences” where parishioners could pay the church to absolve them of their sins. Rather than “buy a clean conscience”, Earth Deeds enables you to onset your program’s travel emissions and support meaningful projects in your host communities. Here’s how onsetting works:

Create a “Team”: A Team is any size group connected through a common event or activity. We can set up Teams for each of your programs and an organization page to keep track of all your Teams.

Choose a Project: We can help you identify sustainability initiatives in your host communities that have meaning to your program participants. Projects are not limited to ones mitigating CO₂ and we have a database of over 100,000 projects if you need help in finding one.

Measure Emissions: We provide you with custom calculators, materials, and reports to engage your participants in measuring, understanding, and tracking their travel emissions. We’re happy to offer technical support and consulting as needed.

Contribute Funds: Participants contribute online and account for their unavoidable emissions based on the social cost of carbon, which is the best scientific estimate of the actual costs of emitting greenhouse gases. We also provide crowdfunding tools to solicit additional funding if desired.

Support the Project: We transfer collected funds to the projects you choose. Earth Deeds is free for you to use and retains a 15% fulfillment fee to enhance our capacity to combat climate change and help other organizations become carbon conscious.

Celebrate: We offer social media tools to promote your efforts and the projects you are supporting. We also can provide a Carbon Conscious ecolabel you can display on your website and materials.

Add value to your programs and support local eco-initiatives.

to get started today.

Example #1

The Center for Ecological Living and Learning worked with their participants on their central American program to account for their travel emissions and support a renewable energy project they visited in Nicaragua.

Example #2

A birding tour company onset its participant travel emission and supported a local NGO working to preserve habitat for endangered birds.