Working towards THE UN SDGS

The United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) provide a framework for collective action to tackle global issues, such as poverty, gender equality and climate change. Companies have an important role to play in contributing to achieving the SDGs.

We have aligned the goals in our People, Places & Planet plan to nine of the SDGs and share some of the highlights of our activities specifically related to each:

Ensure healthy lives and promote well-being for all at all ages

• Exodus Travels provides a safe and healthy workplace for our entire workforce with a dedicated internal staff-led wellbeing committee.

• 56% of our trips are active and 94% visit protected natural areas, inspiring our customers to embrace nature and live healthier lives

• Tackling the cultural stigma surrounding menstruation in rural Nepal, by providing washable sanitary kits and reproductive health education through the Exodus Travels Foundation. We have also introduced free sanitary provisions in the bathrooms of our UK head office.

Ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all

• Developing unconscious bias training for all our team members

• Funding catch-up lessons for children in Zambian rural communities who were unable to access learning facilities during Covid, providing school and vocational scholarships to Nepalese children and young women and funding the renovation of two schools in India through our Foundation

Ensure healthy lives and promote well-being for all at all ages

• Improving gender balance among the ownership of our suppliers

• Providing training for porters and guide training scholarships for 30 women on Mt Kilimanjaro, Tanzania, through the Exodus Travels Foundation

You can find out more about the UN Sustainable Development Goals at sdgs.un.org

Promote sustained, inclusive and sustainable economic growth, full and productive employment and decent work for all

• Pursuing equality and the protection of human rights across all of our trips, and have high standards of welfare for guides and porters

• Avoiding (and where appropriate, actively removing) contrived cultural experiences that are not respectful of people. Instead, we actively seek to support the preservation of cultural and traditional heritage, through our itineraries and knowledge of our local guides

• Supporting local guides, accommodations, food venues and experiences — which not only help the local economy but make our trips more compelling

• Where possible, our trips visit and contribute to community-owned cooperatives and local social enterprises

• Supporting alternative income generation classes through the Village Savings and Loans groups in Tanzania, to help with money management and budgeting, to improve the participants economic prospects

Make cities and human settlements inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable

Supporting a range of grassroots initiatives in hard-to-reach communities across the Himalaya through the Exodus Travels Foundation Ensure sustainable consumption and production patterns

• Inspiring and enabling people to live healthier, more sustainable lives and encouraging this on our trips through our Nature First Travel tips

• Eliminate the distribution of any single-use plastics to clients on trips in our direct operations

Take urgent action to combat climate change and its impacts

• Measuring, monitoring and reducing GHG emissions across the Exodus Travels value chain

• Increasing plant-based meals and engaging with local suppliers to do the same

• Halving our carbon footprint by 2030, investing in nature-based carbon removal projects

• Achieve zero waste to landfill across our offices

Conserve and sustainably use the oceans, seas and marine resources for sustainable develoment

Eliminating the distribution of any single-use plastics to clients on trips in our direct operations

Protect, restore and promote sustainable use of terrestrial ecosystems, sustainably manage forests, combat desertification, reverse land degradation and halt biodiversity loss

• Rewilding 100 square metres per passenger and supporting innovative rewilding efforts

• Ensuring the protection of wildlife and the reduction of human/wildlife conflict

• Building the eBioAtlas and enabling travellers to collect samples to support the IUCN’s global conservation work

• Supporting wildlife protection initiatives such as Wildlife Heritage Areas from World Animal Protection