Viare Travel’s main purpose is to preserve our country through tourism.
To us, this means:
- The preservation and dissemination of our plethora of cultures and customs,
- The encouragement of fair and local trade, and
- Taking car of our environment.
Earlier this year, we started selling flights, in order to add more value to the ground travel services we were already offering our clients.
2017 was declared the International Year of Sustainable Tourism, by the UN. Considering our purpose, we thought about how we could contribute to these efforts, being a small travel agency.
That’s when we had the idea to start an internal project related to our flight sales. Mostly because we realize carbon emissions are one of travel’s biggest threats to our environment, and we already try our best to work with low impact providers on the ground.
So for every flight we sold, we took a set amount from our commission, and set it aside. Our idea was to take this money each semester, and donate it, to some organization that was working on preserving the environment in a select part of Brazil.
We searched far and wide for projects to support, and in the end, opted for a partnership with a sustainability consultancy, Eccaplan. The team there helped us calculate how far our clients had flown, calculated our carbon emission neutralization with the donation, and helped in the contribution to a select project we saw has already proven to neutralize carbon emissions.
And so today, we are happy to announce to our clients, partners, and friends, that in the first semester of 2017, together with our clients, we neutralized 32,590 kg of CO2, through a donation made to the Ecomapuá Amazon (REDD) project!
Thanks to our clients for their trust in our work, Eccaplan, and the Ecomapuá Amazon Project, we’ve had the opportunity to make good with our purpose in doing our part in preserving Brazil.
About the Ecomapuá Amazon Project
Located 30 hours by boat from the capital of the state of Pará (Belém), the Ecomapuá project works on the conservation of 90 thousand aces of the Amazon biome, on the island, Ilha de Marajó. With this project, the extraction of wood resources has been prohibited, one of the main reasons for deforestation. Besides protecting the Amazonian region’s biodiversity, the project also aims to find alternative income sources for local communities, and contributes to the sustainable development of the region. You can read more about the project here.
About ECCAPLAN
Eccaplan is a consulting company in the environment sector, focused on the development and implementation of environmental projects in businesses, with their Residue Management Program, Sustainability and Quantification and Compensation of Greenhouse Gases Reports. The company develops projects and educational programs that are against climate change, like their CO2 program and Neutral Events. Recently they’ve also launched Sou Resíduo Zero (“I’m Zero Residue”).
We plan on continuing with this initiative here at Viare, so we invite all to participate! You can get in touch with us here, and we’ll send you a quote for flights, no commitment is necessary.
Main image: Sustainable Carbon.
