From adventure travel to climate neutrality

DARRELL WADE (OGC 1978), CO-FOUNDER & CHAIR OF INTREPID TRAVEL

Darrell Wade, Co-founder and Chair of Intrepid Travel talks about his company’s journey towards sustainability.

Sustainability is a hard thing to talk about. We all know it’s important, but all too easily you can get bogged down in the arcane minutiae of decarbonisation plans and data sets that can even make an analyst shudder.

Our story at Intrepid has all that, but I won’t bore you with it. Don’t get me wrong – you need detailed plans and execution gurus to get things done in the right way, but it’s not exactly the stuff that will keep you off Netflix at night.

But I think everyone agrees that travel is better than Netflix, so I’ll open our sustainability story with a travel story…. Way back in 2005, I was departing Australia to have a safari in Africa with my young family. We were excited. Who wouldn’t be? I’d planned a holiday that had us exploring some of the best National Parks in Southern Africa, camping under the stars and coming face to face with wildlife’s ‘Big 5’.

You’re probably thinking that the magic of an African safari comes in the thrilling game drives when you’re out spotting lions, elephants and everything else Africa can throw at you. And you’d be right. But in between these adrenaline hits are periods of blissful inactivity sitting around camp, in the shade of trees playing board games, reading books or snacking on treats your cook has created.

Knowing this, at the airport bookshop I picked up a copy of Tim Flannery’s “The Weather Makers”. I’d heard about climate change but didn’t really understand it at all. (Remember, this was 2005!!) My 13-year-old daughter was aghast:

“Dad, that sounds really boring. Can’t you just read Harry Potter or something?”

She had a point. But Tim Flannery it was.

A little more context. After leaving Geelong College I did a commerce degree at the University of Melbourne. I never really wanted to be an accountant or an economist or indeed anything that my degree equipped me for! I loved travel and

didn’t know what else to do, so started an adventure travel company called Intrepid with my best mate from uni. We knew nothing about “the industry” but we loved travel.

Business was good! We were profitable, we were growing quickly, we were having a ton of fun, and we’d

made a real mark in what we called Responsible Travel. Indeed, the year prior to our African safari we’d picked up a significant global award for bestpractice in the space. It seems we were world leaders in sustainability –and it felt good!

But were we really?

Whilst reading The Weather Makers under the shade of an acacia tree I realised we had a problem. A big one. To put it frankly, our travel business was anything but responsible. In fact, we were more like environmental vandals!

The problem was that we were taking people from one corner of the world to another corner of the world and emitting a vast amount of carbon dioxide in the process courtesy of the planes, buses, trains and everything else we used.

We – and our customers – were direct contributors to the impending climate change disaster. My daughter was right – I should have stuck to Harry Potter.

As luck would have it, only a few weeks later I was invited to a dinner with Al Gore. He was on a promotional tour for the film An Inconvenient Truth. I was lucky

enough to sit next to the former Vice President and so I summoned up the courage to share my problem with him.

He was great! He gave me both the courage and a few words of advice as to how to tackle the issue.

In short, he told me, it starts with talking to all your stakeholdersstaff, customers, shareholders etc. (We did, and 91% said we should do something!)

And then start to measure your emissions. (Hard in 2006, but much easier now).

Then start reducing those emissions. (We were poor on this but getting much better now we have signed up for the Science Based Targets initiative.).

And finally offsetting those emissions you can’t eliminate. (Offsets get a bad wrap – but they

are still an essential part of the mix under Paris guidelines).

Easy? Maybe not, but not that hard either. And FOUR years later we were audited as climate neutral and have been ever since.

So, what is the message in this little parable?

Sustainability matters

We all want to live on a planet that is healthy, where people and environments thrive.

We all have a part to play in making that happen

Whether it’s the cars we drive, how we heat our homes, where we go to work and what we buy in shops. Or how we travel!

Finding solutions doesn’t have to be hard work

Whilst sometimes these challenges seem daunting, finding solutions can actually be a lot of fun and extremely rewarding.

We just have to turn off the Netflix and start thinking about what’s possible…..