At Amos Trust, we recognise the value and importance of our travel programme. However, there is a clear conflict between travelling and the climate damage caused by emissions.

We are consciously reflecting as to when, how and if we should travel. This requires us to identify the steps that we take to minimise and limit the harmful impact of the travel that we undertake. We want to take action to improve our travel emissions and consider our carbon footprint.

Our travel programme is divided between:

• Staff travel
  To visit our international partners, to support them personally, monitor and assess the effectiveness of our investment and to ascertain how and where we should be focussing our responses.
  
  
• Partners visits
  Visits to the UK from partner organisations and those we work closely with on advocacy campaigns.
  
  
• Supporter visits
  Established in response to our international partners call to “Come and See...”, to meet people on the ground, to learn from them and develop an understanding of the issues they face and how our partners seek to respond.

Our partner Sami Awad from Holy Land Trust in Bethlehem on a visit to the UK in 2019
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Staff travel and partner visits to the UK

• we seek to ensure that we are not carrying out any unnecessary trips
• we seek to ensure that we maximise the use of remote communications and if necessary, invest in our partners’ IT capabilities to ensure this can occur
• we seek to ensure that we maximise the return on associated carbon emissions, by combining activities and (where appropriate and possible), extending visit
• we seek, whenever possible, to work with local film and sound technicians and local artists
• we have a no-flights policy for travel within the UK.

Partner visits to the UK

• we seek to ensure that we maximise the use of remote communications and if necessary, invest in our partners’ IT capabilities to ensure this can occur
• we seek to ensure that we maximise the return on associated carbon emissions, by combining activities and (where appropriate and possible), extending visits.

Supporter visits

The success of our supporter visit programme in raising awareness, in building relationships, in encouraging people to take part in advocacy activities and in securing funds for our work and our partners’ work has been considerable, and has become the bedrock for our Palestine Justice work.

 An Amos Trust group from the UK visiting Nicaragua in 2020
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Our partners have shared how considerable the benefit is to the communities we visit in tackling isolation and in making solidarity real. Therefore, we must:

• evaluate our supporter trips and ensure that they maximise the return on associated carbon emissions, whether that be through the advocacy activities or donations that result from them or their influence on participants
• rationalise these visits to make sure that we are not carrying out unnecessary trips, and whenever possible, encourage remote access to our partners and the activists we work with
• provide clear advice to supporters on the carbon cost of going on a trip, to help them make informed decisions around travel
• look into all forms of personal offsetting by encouraging trip participants to look at how they might offset the carbon burnt by reducing their carbon footprint elsewhere (as well as through investing in offsets)
• be more intentional in talking to participants about how they intend to use their visit
• enable supporters to extend their visits so that they can maximise their return on the associated carbon emissions.

We are aware of the danger of presenting offsetting as the answer to our carbon emissions. We seek to encourage investment in offsetting through the climate change adaptations that we undertake with our partners, as they seek to respond to the impact of global warming. This mitigates some of the impact and is specifically through a tree-planting programme.