Carbon balanced teacher exchange

In June three Torbay teachers travelled to Cusco and at the end of September Torbay will be hosting three head teachers from Cusco, with what we hope to be the start of a mechanism that should balance their carbon footprint.

Working closely with Marco from Peruvian Sacred Travel in Cusco and the schools south of Cusco, a programme of tree planting is underway in a bid to neutralise the extra carbon generated as a result of our ‘sustainable’ educational activities. We acknowledge that sustainability is the realistic compromise between deep ecology and complex 21st century global relationships. Of course there will be alternatives to our activities, but even our ‘education for sustainable development’ activities have their impact.

There is the inevitable carbon footprint of the travel component between the exchange schools, something we take very seriously and we reckon we have a pretty good response for something that is an important part of the linking programme.

The schools in our network will be planting up their grounds with as many trees as will be appropriate. Once the schools are done we will move onto the local community spaces and individual homes. This will avoid plantations and all their inherent environmental problems, trees will be native fruit, nut and medicinal types thus giving important resources to the communities. Trees in the schools will also be selected on their capacity to provide climbing and exercise for the students.

Marco and the folk at Peruvian Sacred have been great in enabling this to happen, the programme is being applied to all travellers through Marco’s agency as just one of his initiatives to develop and employ sustainable tourism to visitors.