The reckoning · every figure sourced
This is the one page on this site that starts with the bill. Travel has a real footprint, a real leakage problem, and an offsetting industry that mostly does not do what it says. It also has the receipts of the opposite — parks that fund themselves on visits, reefs patrolled on resort payrolls. Both halves are here, sourced, so you can choose with open eyes.
I · The cost, plainly
~8%
Roughly eight percent of global greenhouse-gas emissions, once you count the whole trip — transport, lodging, food, retail, the goods bought along the way. That is nearly four times the older, narrower estimates. A bigger number, and therefore a bigger lever: how those trips are taken, and who they pay, is not a rounding error.
Aviation produces about 2.5% of global CO₂ — but roughly 4% of human-caused warming to date, because contrails and other non-CO₂ effects account for about two-thirds of its net climate impact. There is no honest workaround for the flight; there is only taking fewer, straighter, fuller ones, and making the trip at the end of it count.
Slowly, and behind its own targets. Sustainable aviation fuel was about 0.6% of airline fuel in 2025 — short of the industry's own 0.7% goal for the year — and it costs airlines 4.2 times the price of conventional fuel (IATA, 2025–26). Fleet-wide CO₂ efficiency improved about 1.5% a year from 2019 to 2024, under the 2% the industry agreed to (atmosfair Airline Index 2025). Progress is real; it is just not fast enough to outrun growth, which is why the rest of this page matters.
II · The same trip, two ways
The footprint above is only half the ledger. The other half is who your money reaches on the ground — and there, two trips of identical price can be opposites. Import-related "leakage" — foreign-owned hotels, imported food, repatriated profit — runs 40–50% of gross tourism earnings in small developing economies, and has been estimated at 80% in parts of the Caribbean (UNCTAD; UN Ocean Atlas). The conservation operators in this directory are built the other way up.
| An import-heavy trip | A conservation-built trip | |
|---|---|---|
| Of $100 spent | As little as $20–$60 stays in the destination economy; the rest leaks to foreign owners and imported supply. UNCTAD; UN Ocean Atlas. | At Odzala-Kokoua, ~$100 of every guest night goes straight to the park's protection. Odzala Discovery Camps; African Parks. |
| The payroll | Management and often staff brought in from outside; profits repatriated to headquarters abroad. | Sabi Sand employs ~2,000 people, ~70% from neighbouring Bushbuckridge communities. Sabi Sand; Rhino Africa. |
| The land | The landscape is the backdrop — consumed by the trip, funded by nobody. | Misool's resort payroll runs 18 local rangers and 1,000+ patrols a year across a 121,400-hectare no-take reserve. Misool Foundation. |
| After you leave | The money is gone with you. | Akagera covers ~90% of its running costs from its own tourism; Mara conservancy families are paid monthly whether or not you return. African Parks; MMWCA. |
Same money, opposite machinery. The full per-place accounting lives at Where your money goes.
III · Where offsetting lives in reality
Mostly no — and this is the most studied question in the field. The largest systematic assessment to date, covering roughly one billion tonnes of credits across 2,346 projects, found that fewer than 16% represented real emission reductions (Probst et al., Nature Communications, November 2024). For rainforest-protection credits specifically, a Science study of 26 REDD+ projects found only about 6% of claimable credits tied to real, additional reductions (West et al., Science, August 2023) — the finding behind the January 2023 Guardian / Die Zeit / SourceMaterial investigation that judged more than 90% of the biggest certifier's rainforest credits likely worthless.
The market's own referee agrees more than its marketing does: when the ICVCM integrity council assessed credit methodologies against its Core Carbon Principles, it rejected eight renewable-energy methodologies covering 236 million credits — roughly a third of the entire voluntary market — for failing additionality (ICVCM, August 2024). And aviation's compliance scheme, CORSIA, needs 146–236 million eligible credits for 2024–26 but has found only about 16 million it trusts (IATA, September 2025). Even the buyers of last resort can't find enough credits worth buying.
$6.53 vs ~$6.90
The average voluntary carbon credit cost $6.53 a tonne in 2023 (Ecosystem Marketplace, 2024). Actually removing a tonne of CO₂ from the air costs $1,000–1,300 today at Climeworks' direct-air-capture plant (Sievert et al., Joule, March 2024). Meanwhile ~$6.90 is what it costs African Parks to manage one hectare of real national park for one year — rangers, aircraft, community programs — derived from their audited 2024 financials ($137.4M in expenses across 20+ million hectares). One of these numbers has a ranger in it.
Not all credits are junk: destroying refrigerant gases and capturing landfill methane passed the integrity bar cleanly; metered cookstove projects and jurisdiction-scale forest programs (like the ART/TREES credits Guyana issues) are the honest end of the market (ICVCM 2024–25; Gill-Wiehl et al., Nature Sustainability, 2024). If you buy credits, buy those — look for the CCP label — and treat them as the last slice, not the licence.
But the plainer path skips the intermediary entirely. Give directly to a named project you can point to on a map — or take the trip that is the funding: the permit that pays the vet, the lodge night that is the park budget, the lease that outbids the fence. On this site the money's route to the ground is the whole point, and it is documented per place.
IV · What working looks like
20M+ ha
African Parks now manages more than 20 million hectares across 22 parks in 13 countries, employing over 2,100 rangers — with park revenue, much of it tourism-driven, reinvested straight into protection, and a target of 30 million hectares by 2030 (African Parks, 2024–25). Akagera went from covering 10% of its costs to about 90% on the strength of its visitors. This is "your trip actually helps," audited.
It already is. The Mangrove Breakthrough — the Global Mangrove Alliance, IUCN, governments and private finance — mobilized roughly $4 billion toward protecting and restoring 15 million hectares of mangroves by 2030: close to the entire remaining global estate, after 20% was lost since 1980. Mangroves are the fish nurseries and storm walls of the same coastal communities conservation travel supports.
Rwanda's gorilla-trekking permit is ~$1,500 and funds Volcanoes National Park's rangers, vets and daily monitoring, with 10% of park tourism revenue shared with the villages at the park edge — raised from 5% (Rwanda Development Board). One booking, an entire ecosystem of people rooting for you to show up.
V · The flight, chosen with open eyes
There is no green flight; there are only better and worse ones. Fly less often and stay longer, fly economy on direct routes, and where the route allows, choose a carrier that is actually investing in the problem. The carriers below are named for what they are attempting — ground operations, routing, fleet physics, propulsion — read live from the entity hub.
strongest on
Alaska Air Group’s regional arm runs direct Embraer 175 hops that skip carbon-heavy hub connections. It’s the group’s cabin-circularity testbed: bagasse compostable serviceware, boxed water and paper cups — part of removing 1.8 million pounds of onboard plastics — with crew recycling programs running since the 1980s.
strongest on
The UK’s largest regional carrier runs its GreenSkies program and is working with Cranfield Aerospace Solutions to fly the world’s first operational hydrogen-electric Islander from Orkney by 2027 — decarbonizing the short island routes where hydrogen and batteries make sense first.
strongest on
Named ATW Eco-Airline of the Year, this Scandinavian regional flies Norway’s short fjord-and-island hops — the ideal proving ground for electric flight. Through its Widerøe Zero arm it’s targeting the world’s first commercial fossil-free routes by 2028, and buys mid-life turboprops rather than locking in 30 more years of new fossil jets.
VI · The rigor underneath
Every operator on this site entered through public evidence — certification registries, the UN-backed Protected Planet database, their own documented programs — and passed a human review before publication. We are not a certification body; we read public evidence, weigh it in the open, and say so when we can't verify something. The method is a living document with a dated changelog.