Our Commitment to Environment
We work closely with the communities we visit to ensure we travel sustainably – taking steps to protect the environment and help villages become more environmentally resiliant to natural disasters. We also aim to minimise the environmental impact that our trips have on the places we visit. We are involved in a number of schemes across the regions we serve, to help give back to the communities and landscapes, which we enjoy visiting so much.
Flood Mitigation & Prevention
We have donated funds to schemes in Pakistan and Afghanistan, which help communities to mitigate flood risk, through tree planting and improved drainage networks. Both countries are susceptible to heavy seasonal rain, caused by large swings in temperature – this can lead to flash flooding, devasting villages and crops, particularly in rural areas.
These tree planting schemes help soak up water during times of high rain and protect villages, meanwhile the improved drainage networks divert water back to large watercourses and away from inhabited areas. Many of the projects in Afghanistan are organised in collaboration with Afghan Aid, which completes extensive work across the nation to help alleviate poverty and support Afghan communities.
Waste Reduction Measures
We have a leave no trace policy, ensuring we minimise our impact on the environments we visit. We ensure we leave no litter on all our adventures, but take particular measures to prevent waste on our remote trekking trips.
We ensure there is a strict leave no waste policy, this includes providing a toilet tent, where we dig a hole for human waste and fill it in to decompose after we leave. Glass bottles, jars, tins and other materials are also recycled and given to local nomadic communities, who use them as storage containers. We also use refillable water bottles, sterilising local river and stream water, to ensure guests have a fresh supply of clean water and we don’t create single use plastic waste.
We also team up with nomadic women, who we provide with flour and yeast, then pay them to freshly bake our guests bread. A good way of supporting remote communities financially and reducing waste from plastic wrapped goods. We also support the small community markets, buying fresh produce from local villages, rather than bringing lots of supplies with us, in plastic wrappers.
Clean Water Provision
We have a scheme for guests, who can benefit from refillable water filter bottles, which we post out on request, to our UK guests and those based in Europe. Our guests can then use them on our trips – helping to reduce plastic waste in the nations we visit, where recycling rates can often be poor and there is a high volume of single use plastic produced every year.
These scheme also helps ensure a clean supply of water in some of the challenging destinations we serve, often in remote areas, where access to clean water can be tricky.