We Declare a Climate Emergency
Sea Ranch Abalone Bay Vacation Rental recently signed up to Tourism Declares. This initiative supports tourism businesses, organizations, and individuals that declare a climate emergency and take purposeful action to reduce their carbon emissions. It is based on the advice from The goal of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) to cut global carbon emissions to 55% below 2017 levels by 2030.
Like all signatories, we have committed to the following five actions:
- Develop a ‘Climate Emergency Plan’ within the next 12 months, which sets out our intentions to reduce carbon emissions over the next decade.
- Share an initial public declaration of our ‘Climate Emergency Plan’, and update on progress each year.
- 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.
- Encourage our suppliers and partners to make the same declaration; sharing best practice amongst peers; and actively participate in the Tourism Declares community
- Advocate for change. We recognize the need for system change across the industry to accelerate a just transition towards carbon-free tourism.
Abalone Bay’s Climate Emergency Plan
We present our plan as a growing document. We align it with that of The Sea Ranch’s plan and that of Sonoma County’s Plan:
Our promise to you includes an increase in the health and resilience of social, natural, and built resources to withstand the impacts of climate change.
To that end we adopt the following goals to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and will pursue local actions that support these goals:
- Increase building energy efficiency
- Increase renewable energy use
- Switch equipment from fossil fuel to electricity
- Encourage guests to shift toward low-carbon transportation options
- Increase solid waste diversion
- Reduce water consumption
- Recycle water and increase gray water use
- Increase water-use efficiency
- Increase use of renewable energy in water and wastewater systems
- Reduce emissions from fertilizer use
- Protect and enhance the value of open and working lands
To learn more specifically how we will address these goals and others visit our blog post on the Climate Emergency. Future posts will document our successes and challenges in meeting our goals. We encourage you to join us in this effort.