Seven reasons to consider Ionio for your next beach holiday

01.31.2024

WRITTEN BY Byron Thomas

Seven reasons to consider Ionio for your next beach holiday

Our guide to the complex world of carbon offsetting

At Niarra, we’re constantly looking for ways to help tackle the climate crisis. This means reducing our operational and trip carbon emissions where possible and taking responsibility for the inescapable truth that flying comes with a hefty footprint. While recognising that carbon offsetting is not a perfect solution, we contribute 1% of each trip’s cost to meaningful nature-based carbon sequestration projects.

This contribution ensures that each trip generates further positive impact and more than offsets customer emissions from international flights. For our carbon offsetting partners, we’ve selected nature-based projects because we have a responsibility to tackle both the climate and biodiversity crisis and believe that a thriving natural world has a far-reaching positive impact on people, too. Through economic opportunities, education, and empowerment, the improvement of livelihoods is central to each selected project, just as it is when we design our trips.

Our approach to carbon offsetting is pragmatic in our acknowledgement of its complexities, conservative in our carbon estimates, rigorous in our project selection process, and local in the projects we support. This is also very much the beginning of our journey in understanding and committing to positive impact.

Why is reducing carbon a priority?

Once a nightmarish prediction, the climate crisis is well and truly upon us as atmospheric carbon reaches unprecedented levels. Unlike previous fluctuations in carbon, geologists refer to this one as The Anthropocene since it is due to human activities for the first time in history. Those activities are mostly burning fossil fuels, releasing carbon that has been under the earth’s surface for hundreds of thousands of years. Alongside burning fossil fuels, humans are also responsible for the widespread destruction of nature, removing most of the earth’s natural carbon ‘sinks’ that help to absorb excess carbon from the atmosphere. This dual attack on our carefully balanced planetary system is already altering life on earth for good, rising sea levels and creating more extreme weather patterns.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change estimates that a temperature rise of 1.5 degrees from pre-industrial records is the limit we can withstand before catastrophic consequences, such as displacing hundreds of millions of people living in low-lying coastal zones. If we carry on as we are, scientists predict we will reach this level by 2030.

Net-zero is absorbing or sequestering an equal amount of carbon to that which you emit, and net positive is absorbing or sequestering more carbon than you emit. Besides reducing carbon emissions, offsetting is the only way any business or individual can achieve this.