Our Carbon OffSett Programme that keeps New Zealand Beautiful

We will respect today’s environment while creating a better one for tomorrow. Reducing the impact of our activities on global environmental issues such as climate change, ozone destruction, resource depletion, and loss of habitat and biodiversity. Read about how we are Carbon offsetting and at the same time making New Zealand more Beautiful!

By Planting Thousands & Thousands of Beech Trees!

Ours is a selfish story!

For nearly quarter of a century we have been bringing folks down to enjoy New Zealand great outdoors, aranging hands on adventures like hiking/diving/biking/caving etc to sightseeing tours that involve wine touring with all the finer things in life.

The bottom line is we are selling our natural environment and we acknowledged this from the outset tried to be as sustainable as possible running various environmental initiatives with all of our tourism businesses.

But recently we made the decision to take the dirty approach…

Because of the potential impact of climate change to our planet and New Zealand, a healthy natural environment is more important than ever. For us, we recognise that our core business relies on the transportation of guests throughout our beautiful country and therefore there is a carbon cost to the environment. So after much brainstorming, we have embraced carbon offsetting and its reduction across all of our tourism businesses. We have taken the hands-on and dirty approach, simply put, we are PLANTING TREES. Not just by raising money but we are now actually turning soil - It's hot and back-breaking work, but here we are…

Walking the Walk

Apart from our head office in Auckland, we have offices in Arrowtown and Queenstown, so the challenge for us was finding a group of people who are committed and have a long-term vision to make a significant impact on the environment, so we could get involved and truly offset our emissions. That group of people turned out to be Arrowtown Choppers based in Arrowtown.

Arrowtown Choppers

The Arrowtown Choppers are a volunteer group dedicated to the eradication of the wilding conifers and native revegetation work around Arrowtown. (hence the name chopper - they chop down the non-native wildling pines)

To date, volunteers (including staff from First Light Travel and our sister company New Zealand Trails) have cleared over 100 hectares (247 Acres) of wilding trees and re-planted over 20,000 native trees, including Beech, Totara, Ribbonwood and Kowhai.

The long-term goal of the Arrowtown Choppers is to see natural forest regeneration behind Arrowtown. This includes the introduction of key missing native forest species that were once present. This in turn will help increase the habitat for a range of native birds, lizards, and insects, enriching our biodiversity.

The hills behind Arrowtown have some of the highest densities of falcon in the country due to our mosaic of shrubland, tussock grassland, and beech forest. Small bird species like miromiro/tomtits, piwakawaka/fantails, and korimako/bellbirds help provide a food source for karearea/falcon parents and chicks. In combination with Predator Free Arrowtown, we hope to eventually establish enough forest so that other birds like kea, kaka, and robin can eventually be reintroduced to the area.

Benefits

This reforestation project will have many benefits, including:

long-term carbon sequestration and allowing our tourism businesses to truly be carbon neutral
opportunities for applied research and teaching
extension of the Arrowtown Outer Green Belt
public access to forested areas and walking tracks
establishing working relationships between DOC, the Council, and the public
opportunities for staff and clients to engage in volunteer activities

A Lifetime collaboration

The 'Arrowtown Choppers' is a collaborative project supported by the Arrowtown local community and local businesses including First Light Travel and New Zealand Trails. The project is a significant part of our strategy as a tourism business to become carbon neutral by 2027. As the forest develops, the carbon captured in the trees and soil will help offset our carbon dioxide emissions. The current plan is to plant and nurture over 100,000 seedlings for the foreseeable future. Volunteers will plant around 5000 trees per year. This collaboration represents a novel approach to reforestation and education, where the indigenous biodiversity of the land will be restored while providing a range of benefits to the community.

Join us on the journey of reducing our environmental footprint.

First Light Travel and New Zealand Trails acknowledge our contribution to climate change, and we have a responsibility to commit to a journey of change to reduce our environmental footprint. Our carbon measurement and offset program covers flights, accommodation, and vehicle travel.

You can opt-in and help for as little as $5pp - or not, it's ok, we are going to do it anyway. This year we donated $NZ10.000 (that's 3,333 trees) and volunteered a lot of labor - and we intend to do better every year.