Supporting a wind power offset project in Mauritania

As a certified B Corp™, we are fully committed to increasing the positive impact of our business. A major part of that is our work to reduce our carbon footprint and the carbon dioxide our business is responsible for.

Carbon neutral since 2021, we have been working with Carbon Footprint to assess our emissions and identify those we can’t avoid – from running our building, using company vehicles and international travel. We have now offset these for 2022, contributing to a Gold Standard wind power offset project in Noukachott, Mauritania.

The Noukachott Wind Power Project

Despite an abundance of natural resources, Mauritania remains poor and is classified as a ‘Least Developed Country’ by the United Nations. The West African country’s economy is based on agriculture and livestock and its electricity grid is mainly powered by fossil fuel (mostly gas oil and fuel oil) and imports.

The wind power offset project in Mauritania’s capital city, Noukachott, is the first wind farm in the country, supplying an equivalent of 140,000 people with green electricity. The farm features 15 turbines installed on 1,000 ha of unoccupied land and supplies 14% of the electricity’s need of Nouakchott. Part of a solution to climate change, it balances out unavoidable emissions, helping to reduce global CO2e emissions and supporting projects that bring economic and social enhancements to developing countries.

Travel Places Managing Director, Matthew Warren, said of the Gold Standard Noukachott project: “We’re pleased to be able to support this great project, which brings wider benefits to one of the poorest countries in the world, through the development of green electricity, which will reduce the country’s importation of fossil fuel.

“Supporting projects such as this through Carbon Footprint allows us to compensate for the unavoidable emissions involved in the running of our business. We can’t escape the impacts of the travel involved to achieve the programmes we support, but we can do more to increase our positive impact. Given the nature of our business, staff travel is a major part of our own carbon footprint and offsetting is just one way that we can reduce that. But being carbon neutral is just one piece of the puzzle. Offsetting sits alongside many other measures we have introduced to reduce emissions, increase our positive impact and support a more sustainable future for our industry.”

Going forward, we are identifying opportunities to develop our own offsetting projects, and we’re excited to be moving forward with our Travel Places forest. Having completed the purchase of land in Devon, planting will start later in the year.

To find out more about our sustainability activity at Travel Places, our journey to B Corp and how we can support your business to make better informed and sustainable travel decisions, visit our sustainability pages here.