Tour Guide, Havana, Cuba
| 3 mins read
Together with other travel professions, we’ve signed up with Tourism Declares to declare a climate emergency and take purposeful action to reduce our carbon emissions as per the advice from The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) to cut global carbon emissions 55% below 2017 levels by 2030.
Like all signatories, we have committed to the following five actions:
1. Develop a ‘Climate Emergency Plan’ within the next 12 months, which sets out our intentions to reduce carbon emissions over the next decade. Our plan will reflect our long-term commitment and tangible actions we are taking in this direction.
2. Share an initial public declaration of our ‘Climate Emergency Plan’, and update our progress every year in our published annual reports.
3. Accept current IPCC advice stating the need to cut global carbon emissions to 55% below 2017 levels by 2030 to keep the planet within 1.5 degrees of warming. We’ll ensure our ‘Climate Emergency Plan’ represents actions designed to achieve this as a minimum through delivering transparent, measurable and increasing reductions in the total carbon emissions per customer arising from our operations and the travel services sold by us.
4. Encourage our suppliers and partners to make the same declaration, share best practices amongst peers, and actively participate in the Tourism Declares community.
5. Advocate for change. We recognize the need for system change across the industry and call for urgent regulatory action to accelerate the transition towards zero-carbon air travel.
We commit to the sustainability of the environment and the local community by promoting in our trips the following:
We include services in the private sector in Cuba like staying in locally owned properties, eating in private restaurants called paladars. We encourage and sometimes include the tipping of locals involved in executing the services of your trip.
Our programs bring you in contact with the local culture, the way of life of Cuba today. This is the great Cuban music and dance, the architecture, the afro-Cuban religion and even politics. We do this without prejudices and without any interest in gaining your support. We only ask you to respect it as we respect your opinions. We believe that the purpose of travel is to have new experiences.
We include a lot of experiences of nature like hikes in national parks. We include all fee payments for this and do it with the proper guides. This is the best guarantee that your presence contributes to the preservation of the area.
We include as many open-air activities as possible. We try to do as much as possible visits on foot as it is the best way to discover a place. We try to include transportation means that also the locals use like bicycles or old American vintage cars.
Our programs don’t involve the exploitation of animals. Swimming with dolphins and horseback riding are typical experiences in Cuba, and we don’t want to discourage you from having them. We only will offer the services organized by providers that give their animals fair treatment.
In Cubafortravel we believe travel must be good for travellers as well as for the communities visited. It must be good for the world as a whole. By signing this Climate Emergency Declaration for tourism, we want this principle to be our guide for the future.