Meaningful Spotlight: How Exodus Adventure Travels Charts the Course for Nature Positive Tourism

Caption: Exodus Adventure Travels Porters at Machu Picchu

Why Nature Positive?

Nature underpins all of life on earth. Without clean air, fresh water, and thriving oceans and lands that support lush flowers, forests, and marine and wildlife, our industry would cease to exist. At Exodus Adventure Travels, nature is not just a backdrop to our adventures; it's the stage upon which our experiences unfold and how our customers can truly connect with the amazing world that we live in.

Across the world, nature is at extreme risk. Biodiversity is waning, species are being lost, and ecosystems are threatened like never before. For tour operators and any business that supports and depends on travel, there is a responsibility to act as stewards of the environment and to raise awareness about fragile ecosystems and the need for their protection.

Starting Our Nature Positive Journey

In 2020, Exodus Adventure Travels set out to be nature positive and to give back more to nature than our adventures take. From the start, we recognised that in order to be credible, our ambition needed to be based on more than words and lofty goals, but underpinned by a robust strategy for action. The IPBES Global Assessment Report on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES, 2019) was the starting point. The IPBES report explained the five key drivers of biodiversity loss and helped us to identify actions within our business operations that would minimise or avoid unsustainable activities and could work towards restoring nature. To help simplify this for internal and external communication, we then aligned our plan with the Nature Positive Tourism Roadmap developed by Animondial (and presented in the World Travel & Tourism Council report) as a relatively simple process of action to “remove, reduce, and restore.”

The plan identified the things we needed to remove entirely (i.e. plastics, any negative wildlife interactions, other waste), the negative impacts we needed to take action to reduce (i.e. carbon emissions, ecosystem exploitation), and the areas where we had an opportunity to bring about positive change and restore nature (i.e. investing in rewilding and citizen science activities). These actions formed the basis of our Nature Positive Plan and its corresponding goals.

Our Next Steps

At the end of 2022, there was a steep change in the global commitment to biodiversity. 188 governments signed the landmark Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework, which set a new ambition for nature and biodiversity, not least with a goal of 30% of all land being protected by 2030.  This year, we have therefore taken the step to refocus our own Nature Positive Plan around this Framework. 

Caption: An Exodus travel group at a waterfall.

We have chosen to focus specifically on 16 of the Framework’s 23 goals and have set targets for each. These 16 goals recognise the importance of connecting nature, carbon reduction, and community development, and resonate strongly with the way that we have been operating our business for the past 50 years, as well as the world that we want to continue to take our customers into over the next 50. In particular, we aim to address the Framework’s goals by showing our commitment in ways such as our financial support for nature protection, how we engage our customers in citizen science to identify invasive and vulnerable species and support conservation, provide support via the Exodus Travels Foundation for human-wildlife co-existence projects, remove plastics on our trips, recognise the importance of indigenous people as custodians of the land, and provide support for communities so they can better value nature.

Our new plan keeps the internal and external messaging simple to help to further increase awareness and traction. We even added “regenerate” as the fourth category after “remove”, “reduce” and “restore” to emphasise the need to go beyond just putting things back the way they were previously. 

As a tour operator, we know that achieving some of the goals we set will be dependent on others in our value chain. We think, however, that setting out our ambition and goals from the start, recognising the challenges, and working with others to help find and scale solutions, will make the pathway towards truly being a nature positive business far easier. 

To learn more, check out Tourism Cares’ free course “Nature Positive Tourism” on the Meaningful Travel Platform.