Climate Emergency

This is why:

For the past 10 years, Legendary Adventure has been welcoming small groups of hikers and nature travellers to Portugal, providing them close contact with our country’s natural wonders and culture.

We’ve always had a slow travel approach, with experiences that give back to the places we visit, and the people we meet. We use local suppliers, owned and run by local people, eat at local restaurants, and stay in locally run accommodation.

We are recognised as a Sustainable Tourism Company by the Portuguese Tourism Board, and the core of our business is to explore our beautiful country on foot, or using a bike, but we can’t ignore that we are part of an industry with a huge negative impact in our planet and in our common resources.

The tourism industry is responsible alone for 8% of the world’s carbon footprint. For this, and because a change is absolutely necessary and inevitable, we’ve decided to join the network of organisations, companies and individuals working in tourism that declared a Climate Emergency.

We believe it’s our personal and social responsibility, as a business and a group of human beings who love nature and to travel, to do whatever we can to preserve this earth for our future generations.

We are already working on a zero-waste-to-landfill policy in our head office, and we are studying solutions to reduce even further our footprint.

For all this, we joined the Tourism Declares a Climate Emergency, a collective of 287 travel organisations, companies, and professionals who have declared a climate emergency and are coming together to find solutions.

We acknowledge the science stating we have to act now to address this crisis over the next decade.

We accept our responsibility, to tell the truth, work together, and help build a new, regenerative tourism industry.

We have committed to the following five actions:

1. Develop a ‘Climate Emergency Plan’ within the next 12 months, which sets out our intentions to reduce carbon emissions over the next decade.
2. Share an initial public declaration of our ‘Climate Emergency Plan’, and update on progress each year.
3. Accept current IPCC advice stating the need to cut global carbon emissions to 55% below 2017 levels by 2030 in order to keep the planet within 1.5 degrees of warming. We’ll ensure our ‘Climate Emergency Plan’ represents actions designed to achieve this as a minimum, through delivering transparent, measurable and increasing reductions in the total carbon emissions per customer arising from our operations and the travel services sold by us.
4. Encourage our suppliers and partners to make the same declaration; sharing best practice amongst peers; and actively participate in the Tourism Declares community
5. Advocate for change. We recognise the need for system change across the industry, and call for urgent regulatory action to accelerate the transition towards zero carbon air travel.

We share a core belief that Responsible Travel leads to Sustainable Tourism, and the fundamental principles and goals of our sustainability policies can be read here.

This is a document and a process in progress, towards a better and fairer way of traveling.