How we measure our carbon footprint

As the saying goes, “you can’t manage what you don’t measure”. Explore signed up to the Glasgow Declaration in October 2021, and formally committed to a target of reducing our carbon footprint by 50%, by 2050. To enable us to get there we need to know what our starting point is. 


To help us “manage” the reduction, we needed to first “measure” our output. So, in partnership with ecollective, we have now measured the carbon footprint of everything - almost 2000 accommodation providers, 240 staff commutes, 186,000 brochures, 85,000kms of train travel on tour, 860 city tours and much more!

One of the hardest parts was getting started. It was easy to feel overwhelmed by the amount of data we needed to collect, and we spent weeks building a database and testing it. But once we were up and running, it was much easier than we thought – we just needed time to go through everything and spent nearly 6 weeks measuring every element of the tours.

Next comes the fun part! Now that we know our footprint, we can start looking for ways to bring it down. That doesn’t mean stripping fun things out of the trip though – it means searching for lower impact ways of experiencing a destination. Think chatting to locals on trains instead of waiting in airport queues to take a flight, hopping in a cycle rickshaw, or picking accommodation that’s embracing renewable energy sources.