Combine your travel with tree planting and help tackle the climate crisis

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Trees need protecting for the health of the planet, as well as the safety of its biodiversity. Photo: Volcanoes Safaris

Published: 8:00am, 17 Dec 2019Updated: 8:00am, 17 Dec 2019

The recent United Nations climate conference, COP25, ended without any solid plan to tackle the climate crisis. Big corporates and governments are just not committing enough time or resources to looking at this terrifying problem. Luckily, some organisations are trying to make a difference, particularly when it comes to trees. A recent study suggested we can fight climate change by planting a trillion trees – it received a viral response, including volunteers in India and Ethiopia putting millions of saplings into the soil in a day.

Travellers in particular can help with this aspect of trying to fix the planet.

Firstly, we all need trees. Not only are they “the best technology we have for sequestering carbon”, as Diana Chaplin, canopy director of One Tree Planted, puts it, but they also provide erosion control and shade, deliver oxygen into the atmosphere, protect waterways, and shelter animals.

Secondly, air travel releases excessive amounts of carbon into the atmosphere. The increasing number of travellers – there were a record-breaking 1.4 billion international arrivals in 2018, according to the World Tourism Organisation – are worsening the very crisis we are relying on trees to help us mitigate.

Sure, you can buy carbon offsets – investments in projects that reduce greenhouse gases – to counter the carbon emissions created by travel; the Gold Standard is an independent, internationally recognised, reliable resource for finding such investments. While offsets may help cancel out carbon generated by your trip, they won’t erase emissions already in the atmosphere; that carbon is still up there, as Bruce Hamilton, environmental organisation Sierra Club’s senior director of programme policy and internal governance, points out.