Entries about impact

There were many questions in my head when we started dreaming about a longer term road travel period. Lots of operational questions we already started to solve as the dream become more and more our reality. One quite fundamental question remained: how can we make our travel more responsible in terms of the environment? To preserve our planet was important to me for some time as I realised that we just borrowed this planet from our children.

So in the past ten years we already made some quite big decisions to limit our impact on the environment. We renovated a house instead of building a new one. It was done in a way to become almost totally energy efficient. We used a heat pump, extreme insulation and heat recuperating ventillation system so our former home reached the top level of the local energy efficiency category (AA++). We also installed a solar panel and switched to a PHEV vehicle so we did 90% of our kms on solar power last year. We are quite conscious shoppers focusing on bulk packaged items and generally we limit waste quite well.

The coming year with a large vehicle towing a large trailer will be definetely a step back in that respect. We will take at least two intercontinental fligths which we did not do in the past ten years. So the question was how should we compensate to some extent this increasing environmental damage? After some web research I found out that there are organisations helping to fund project which carry on very important tasks in the field of reduction and prevention of environmental damage. They fund tree planting and nature protection projects globally and other CO2 reduction activities. So we decided as a first step to compensate our fligths and our 20.000 km drive CO2 equivalent via www.carbonfootprint.com

The process was very simple: first we calculated the CO2 emissions caused by our activity which resulted about 13.6 tonnes of CO2. Then we browsed the options to counteract this emission trough activities funded by this organisation and selected the Global Portfolio of Verified Carbon Reduction Projects.

On top of this small commitment we will do our best to limit our environmental impact during camping. We will also work with our kids to make them understand the importance of protecting the nature and limiting our impact while exploring the world.