As a business, we take the responsibility to the countries we visit very seriously. Responsible Tourism is a phrase that is thrown around a lot, and it’s important to follow through with actions rather than just say them.

Preserving landscapes and treating them with respect is standard, and we believe we must find the time to care, not only for the places, we visit but for their people too.

Aiding Local Economy 

For all overseas challenges, we work in conjunction with small, local ground handlers who work to our preference of employing local guides and staff. Using as much local infrastructure as possible means that we can preserve the local economies and ‘give back’. We aim to ensure that all local guides and staff are given a fair wage in accordance with appropriate local standards. On top of this, it means we can ensure that all our challenges have been designed and are delivered with the knowledge of local people!

Climate Care

At Global Adventure Challenges, we believe that we all have a responsibility to help fight climate change and as a company, we are committed to offsetting as much of the carbon generated by our challenges as we possibly can.

With this in mind, we have partnered with three different organisations who are focussed on fighting deforestation and climate change through tree planting.

• In the Andes, we have teamed up with ECOAN, a non-profit NGO dedicated to the conservation of endangered species and threatened Andean ecosystems. Find out more here: www.ecoanperu.org
• In Indonesia we have teamed up with Yagasu, an NGO working for mangrove restoration and protection. You can find out more about their work here: https://www.yagasu.or.id/  
• We are also partnered with the Bujang Raba Community PES project, dedicated to conserving endangered primary rainforest in Sumatra's Bukti Barisan forest. Find out more here: http://www.planvivo.org/project-network/bujang-raba
• In the UK we are working with Trees for Life, a conservation charity dedicated to rewilding the Scottish Highlands. Find out more about their work at www.treesforlife.org.uk

Going forward, our climate care strategy will be to plant trees in an effort to offset the carbon footprint of our challenges and so as part of the inclusions in the cost of your challenge, we guarantee that for every participant who travels on one of our open challenges we will plant a number of trees through one of the organisations above. Due to flight length and activities on the ground, the carbon footprint for each challenge will differ which will impact the number of trees planted per participant. For further information on the number of trees planted on each challenge, please check the individual challenge summary page or refer to the tables below.

As this new strategy is very much in its infancy we are currently focussed solely on tree planting, and the purchasing and planting of the trees will happen on an annual basis at the end of our challenge season. At the end of 2020, we will update our website with the number of trees that have been planted, plus we’ll send a newsletter to all our participants, charity clients and email subscribers. If you’d like to be kept updated, then you can submit your email address in the footer below! We will also commit to donating between 3,000 – 5,000 trees, to be split between our partner organisations above.

Travelling, especially flying has a significant impact on the environment but at the same time has an incredibly positive impact on the local communities in the countries we visit, and so we truly believe that we need to continue travelling to these fantastic places! We know that we can’t be carbon-free, but this strategy is our first steps in aiming to be carbon neutral and maybe one day climate positive!

Day-to-Day

From recycling paper and plastic, using environmentally friendly monitors or even just encouraging staff to car share or take public transport – we believe caring begins at home, and this is standard.

National Trails

We are proud to support the National Trails and follow their provided guidelines for event organisers. For every challenge that takes place on National trails for 50 participants or more we make a donation of £1 per person towards the maintenance of the trail.

Never Standing Still

We are continuously looking to review and update our policies regarding tourism, and we are aware that we can always do more – please keep checking back to see what we are working on!