G Adventures invests in tree-planting start-up

Bruce Poon Tip, G Adventures founder, said the investment reflected growing demand from travellers to ensure their journeys "have a meaningful impact".

"Preservation of local environments is critical to supporting community tourism as it helps improve air and water quality for local people, and supports wildlife habitats," said Poon Tip.

He said the platform would help G achieve this while also combating climate change, with tree-planting being "one of the easiest ways to help decrease emissions".

"I’ve never been a fan of carbon offsetting," Poon Tip continued. "The idea that you can have a negative impact in one place and do something positive somewhere else, and that somehow balances the scale, is not science to me, and most of all it doesn’t change people’s behaviour.

"Reforest provides a solution that truly has benefits for the places tourism touches, and presents the results in a way travellers can see the positive change they are enabling."

Reforest co-founder Daniel Walsh said G’s investment would allow the platform to improve its technology, and market more widely throughout the travel trade by turning hard climate data such as kilograms of CO2 into "visual understandable measures" like trees planted.

"A customer can see the trees a travel company is planting on their behalf and track the cumulative restorative impact of their trip as a result," said Walsh, who explained how Reforest uses drone footage and satellite imagery to bring people’s contribution to life.

Walsh added G’s investment would allow Reforest to "create a showcase example of restorative tourism at work".