Intrepid Travel ditches SBTi in favour of ‘feasible’ Scope 3 target
Australian B-corp seeks more realistic goal with new climate strategy, which also sees it axe offsets
Australian tour operator Intrepid Travels has quit the Science Based Targets initiative (SBTi) after accepting it won’t meet the decarbonisation goals it set itself in 2020.
One of the earliest adopters of SBTi, the B-Corp announced an overhaul of its climate strategy on Wednesday.
“We are not comfortable maintaining a target that we know we won’t meet,” wrote CEO James Thornton and chair Darrell Wade in a joint statement.
“While we’ve made progress with our Scope 1 and Scope 2, Intrepid is not on track to meet our Scope 3 Science Based Target by 2034,” they noted.
Intrepid had committed to reduce its emissions intensity “per passenger days from its trip operations” by 56% over the period, against a 2018 baseline.
But Wade and Thornton said more than 95% of the firm’s value-chain emissions come from activities outside its direct control, such as flights, ground transport and accommodation, for which it has more than 10,000 suppliers.
“While we can – and do – educate and influence, we are not able to create the change that we need at the scale that we need it,” claimed the pair. 
Under the new strategy, Intrepid promises to reduce the intensity of its “customer journey trip and airfare emissions (Scope 3) by 8% per customer per day by 2030 (or 1.6% YoY) from a 2024 base year”.
Unlike the old target, the new one includes customer flights, which represent 75% of the firm’s Scope 3 footprint.
When asked about the role climate science plays in the new goal, Intrepid’s general manager for purpose, Sara King, told Real Economy Progress the target was the result of “a bottom-up analysis to see what is feasible while still striving for an ambitious goal”.
Its decision to adopt a 1.6% intensity target means it is less ambitious than the SBTi recommendation of 2.5%-3%, because so much of the company’s footprint comes from customer flights.
“We had to align with the current pathway projects for aviation, which is 1.5% per year,” explained King, adding that the new target was the “most appropriate for our current growth phase” and “allows emissions to scale with business expansion, offering flexibility as we grow into new markets and increase customer numbers”.
On Scope 1 and 2, Intrepid is introducing a new “science-aligned” absolute reduction target of 21% by 2030, from a 2024 base year.
The company explained that the term “science-aligned” refers to the fact the target is informed by climate science, but not yet independently verified.
The new climate strategy will also see Intrepid ditch its carbon offsetting programme, which has helped it balance its emissions since 2010, and abandon its carbon neutrality certification.
Instead, it wants to focus its investments on decarbonising its own activities, through initiatives such as switching to electric vehicles, it said.
“Offsets served an important purpose, but they no longer reflect the scale or immediacy of the challenge,” Wade and Thornton wrote.