Carbon footprint progress report 2025.

An update on our carbon reporting progress.

Our direct footprint Customer flights (estimated) Each square is 100 tonnes of CO₂e
3,372t CO₂e

Our direct footprint in 2025: our own emissions and those of the trips we sell.

21,541t CO₂e

Estimated from customer flights to and from our trips. We don’t sell flights, but we think it’s important to account for them.

24,913 t CO₂e in total, 86% of it from customer flights

Why we publish this every year.

In 2020, to mark the COP26 Glasgow climate talks, we helped launch a movement with the United Nations Environment Programme, the United Nations World Tourism Organisation, The Travel Foundation and VisitScotland. It led to the travel industry declaring a climate emergency, with signatories committing to the ‘Glasgow Declaration’: a pledge to measure and reduce carbon emissions, and to encourage the rest of the industry to do the same. We continue to honour those commitments.

We’re delighted the programme has since been adopted by the United Nations World Tourism Organisation’s One Planet initiative, encouraging travel businesses and destinations worldwide to take climate action and cut carbon.

As one of the first signatories, we’ve made the same commitment. Every year we share our carbon footprint and publish a transparent climate action plan. Below you’ll find our 2025 carbon report, then every goal in our plan, one by one, and how far we got. What we learn along the way shapes the goals in our 2026/27 plans.

900+
organisations have now signed the Glasgow Declaration, committing to measure and reduce their emissions
2020
the year we helped launch Tourism Declares a Climate Emergency

Our carbon footprint.

Much Better Adventures’ total direct carbon footprint in 2025 was 3,372,183 kg (3,372 tonnes) CO₂e. This covers our own emissions and those of the trips we sell. It’s up on last year’s 2,416,605 kg (2,416 tonnes) because our business has grown significantly.

Our emissions per customer are falling year on year, though. Taking all our direct activities into account, they’ve dropped from an average of 350 kg CO₂e per customer night in 2022 to 227 kg in 2025.

Total direct footprint

Tonnes CO₂e, excluding customer flights

2024
2,416 t
2025
3,372 t

Per customer night

kg CO₂e, all direct activities

2022
350 kg
2025
227 kg

A night on one of our trips.

Looking solely at emissions from our trips, we’re working towards 23 kg per customer per night by 2030, in line with our Glasgow Declaration statement (which focuses on carbon intensity rather than absolute emissions).

In 2025, this was 29 kg per customer per night – an improvement on previous years.

Trip emissions per customer per night

kg CO₂e. Select a year to see what changed.

29 kgCO₂e per customer, per night

What makes up a night on our trips

    We include a sizeable buffer to allow for a margin of error in our calculations.

    Our fully remote headquarters.

    Our own operations produce 2.8 tonnes of CO₂e per employee, mostly from business travel, working from home and the goods we buy. According to the Carbon Trust, a typical UK office-based business produces around 3 to 5 tonnes of CO₂e per employee, so our operational footprint per employee is roughly 25–45% lower.

    2,802 kgCO₂e per employee

    Our own operations in 2025

      Our adventures and HQ

      Carbon emissions are categorised into Scopes 1, 2 and 3. As a remote, agency-based company, all of ours fall under Scope 3 (use of sold goods and services). They break down as follows.

      But what about the big chunk of emissions from customer flights?

      We don’t sell flights, but we know many of our customers fly to and from the start of our trips.

      These flights aren’t included in Much Better Adventures’ direct carbon footprint, but we think it’s important to account for them. Our official measurement and reduction goals focus on our headquarters and our trips, because that’s where we have the most control and the biggest opportunity to make a difference.

      We do, however, estimate the carbon footprint of our customers’ flights. It helps us find ways to minimise their impact, such as creating more adventures closer to home and reachable by train.

      We estimate these flights generated another 21,540,900 kg (just under 21,541 tonnes) of CO₂e. In total, we estimate our activities generate 24,913,083 kg (just under 25,000 tonnes) of CO₂e.

      Our trips are designed to be low carbon. Getting to them is not.

      3,372 t
      MBA direct footprint, 14% of the total
      21,541 t
      Customer flights, 86% of the total, from getting customers to and from our trips
      24,913 t
      CO₂e in total

      Our climate action plan.

      It’s broken down into four areas: Measure, Reduce, Remove and Campaign. Every year, we update the plan with our goals for the year ahead, publish our carbon footprint and assess our progress against the goals we set. Here’s how we got on in 2025, and what’s next in each area.

      Measure.

      Counting the emissions we had left out, starting with customer flights.

      2024 goals

      In 2024, our carbon analysis estimated all local transport, accommodation, activities, guides, staff and office operations, and food. But it didn’t include customer flights or travel to the destination.

      Because we don’t book flights and our customers come from all corners of the world, we had no reliable way of knowing their travel plans, so we left them out of the figures. But they make up such a big part of the carbon picture that simply giving up and ignoring them felt disingenuous.

      2025 progress

      With our carbon measurement partner ecollective, we’ve estimated the emissions from customer flights to and from our trips for the first time. Measuring them is a valuable start, but reducing them is the real challenge, and we don’t yet have a concrete plan to do that. Over the next year, we’ll work to better understand these emissions and explore practical ways to cut the carbon footprint of every customer’s journey, as well as the trips they take with us.

      We show the carbon per night for every trip in the ‘extra information’ section of its page on our website, but we think there’s more we can do to connect customers with this information.

      Our measurement system is detailed enough to show us clearly where we can work with our hosts to cut trip emissions further – particularly the accommodation used on trips and the number of meat-free meals served.

      2026/27 goals

      We’ll keep improving the accuracy of our customer flight estimate and build recent changes in the way we work into our measurement – in particular, our increased use of AI.

      We also want to better understand how accommodation choices affect our trips. Currently, hotel emissions are based on national averages, which means swapping one hotel for another makes no difference to a trip’s footprint – even if the second runs entirely on renewable energy. Being able to estimate the footprint of the exact hotels on our itineraries would be a big step forward, helping us work with our Host partners to identify the most impactful changes to the trips they run.

      As our measurement improves (and we start counting things we hadn’t before), our total footprint may go up rather than down. But we’ve always prioritised understanding and tackling our impact in a meaningful way over token changes that make the numbers look better.

      Reduce.

      Working with our hosts to phase out higher-carbon choices.

      2024 goals

      We aimed to develop a carbon reduction strategy and framework to help our local hosts phase out higher-carbon choices, particularly in accommodation, menus and transport.

      We also said we’d keep expanding our range of adventures reachable by train, along with an ever wider range of big adventures designed to encourage customers to fly less and stay longer.

      2025 progress

      With ecollective’s help, we now have a clear carbon reduction framework that shows where changes will have the most impact.

      We’re pleased that our trip emissions per customer per night have kept falling (by an average of 3 kg per night in 2025). Working with our hosts to develop lower-carbon trips is moving things in the right direction. We’ve still got some way to go to hit our ambitious target of 23 kg per customer per night, but we’re heading the right way.

      Our customers’ average length of stay has increased over the last few years in most regions around the world.

      We offer a range of trips reachable by train and have kept adding week-long versions of our best-selling weekend trips, encouraging customers to stay longer.

      2026/27 goals

      We’ll keep working with our Hosts to help them understand where a trip’s biggest emissions come from – most often, an internal flight. This is a genuine dilemma: an internal flight can also be what makes it possible to visit a remote community that would otherwise see no economic benefit from tourism at all. We raise awareness of the carbon impact of every part of a trip’s design, but ultimately trust our Hosts, as the local experts, to strike that balance.

      We’ll also keep helping our hosts understand their carbon footprint, sharing simple ways to measure it and pointing out where the biggest, most meaningful changes can be made, both in our regular communications and at face-to-face events like our Host Summit.

      There are changes to be made on accommodation, too. Just five trips generate over 15% of all our accommodation emissions, so we’ll be digging into the data to see where changes could be made.

      And we’ll look at how to better incorporate and promote rail travel – both to and from our trips and within them – through new partnerships and incentives.

      Remove.

      Showing customers their full footprint, and funding forests through the World Land Trust.

      2024 goals

      We said we’d upgrade our carbon measurement tools so that, when a customer books, we can accurately measure the carbon emitted by their individual travel plans too.

      2025 progress

      Our measurement has improved, but we think we can do more to connect customers with the full carbon footprint of their trip and encourage them to think about ways to reduce it. We’ll look at new tools to do this and build them into the booking process.

      We already calculate and publish the in-destination carbon footprint of every trip. This doesn’t include international flights, which we estimate make up around 86% of our trips’ total footprint, so we’re working on ways to show customers the full picture and help them reduce it.

      Our work with the World Land Trust in 2025.

      For every trip, we contribute £15 per tonne of CO₂e from its in-destination emissions to forest protection and restoration projects run with local communities and supported by the World Land Trust. In 2025, this came to £50,584.

      This doesn’t make a trip carbon neutral or cancel out its emissions. Instead, it funds the conservation of high-biodiversity tropical forests through REDD+ projects certified to the Climate, Community and Biodiversity Standard (CCBS) and the Verified Carbon Standard (VCS), helping to store carbon, protect wildlife and support the communities who look after these forests.

      We also support the World Land Trust’s Buy an Acre scheme. In 2025, we donated £210,678 to help local community organisations buy and conserve land, securing 1,111 acres of biodiversity-rich natural habitat across projects in Argentina and Patagonia, Ecuador, Kenya, South Africa and Uganda.

      £50,584
      to forest protection and restoration, at £15 per tonne of in-destination CO₂e
      £210,678
      donated to the Buy an Acre scheme
      1,111 acres
      of biodiversity-rich natural habitat secured. Each square is 10 acres.
      Argentina and PatagoniaEcuadorKenyaSouth AfricaUganda

      2026/27 goals

      We’ll keep supporting the World Land Trust as it helps communities buy and manage their own forests, protects biodiversity and helps preserve global carbon sinks.

      We’ll back initiatives that make it cheaper and easier for our Hosts to measure their own carbon footprint, and look into developing a carbon insetting programme. This would mean investing in cutting emissions within our own supply chain – for example, through grants to help Hosts install solar panels or EV charging points.

      We’ll also renew our focus on encouraging customers to make better travel choices by:

      • trialling incentives for low-carbon travel
      • making it easier to book lower-carbon alternatives, by connecting customers with the BookBetter website when they book their trips
      • encouraging them to support wildlife and forest conservation through the World Land Trust.

      Campaign.

      Our biggest reduction gains are likely to come from moving the whole industry.

      2024 goal

      Given our relatively small size and carbon footprint, we recognised that our biggest carbon reduction gains were likely to come from campaigning. That’s why, in 2020, we co-founded the Tourism Declares a Climate Emergency movement, known at COP26 as the Glasgow Declaration.

      Our goal for 2024 was to keep supporting, advising and advocating for climate action through the frameworks we helped establish.

      2025 progress

      Tick

      We continued to show leadership and share best practice on a variety of industry panels and talks.

      While our passion for carbon reduction hasn’t dimmed, many more people wanted to travel the Much Better Adventures way in 2025. Our attention was pulled elsewhere, and we achieved less here than we’d planned. To address this, we decided to recruit a dedicated team member to amplify and expand our work on positive social and environmental impact.

      We advertised the role in early 2026, and in April a Head of Impact with 20 years’ experience in sustainable development joined the team to take the reins on our carbon reduction and wider positive impact goals.

      2026/27 goals

      We’ll keep finding opportunities to campaign. We’re particularly keen to support a review and update of the Glasgow Declaration to drive even more meaningful outcomes, and we’ll work with industry organisations such as ETOA and UNWTO to make carbon measurement tools and methods more widely accessible.

      We’ll also look at how we can work more closely with our network of fellow B Corp-certified travel companies to tackle carbon measurement and reduction challenges together.

      Where we go from here.

      We passionately believe in the transformational power of adventure to protect wild places, support local communities – and make people feel alive.

      As we close the chapter on 2025, we’re optimistic about our continued journey towards a smaller carbon footprint, and about leading the industry in ever more sustainable travel.

      We’re looking forward to improving our measurement systems, working with our partners and customers on new ways to cut emissions, removing the carbon we can’t reduce through a stronger partnership with the World Land Trust, and continuing to campaign for industry-wide progress towards the targets set out in the Glasgow Declaration.

      A big thank you to the team at ecollective Carbon, a carbon consultancy focused on measuring and reducing organisations’ carbon footprints, for helping us with this summary and our carbon journey.

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