Sustainable lifestyles for travelers

Future Camp organizes unique holiday programs designed to educate travelers to share, economize, respect and become aware of their impact on the planet. Gabriele tells us everything about it.

Datei 06.12.17, 11 19 16Who are you?

I am a journalist and the founder of future.camp® – a centre of competence for sustainable lifestyles: www.futurecamp.vision. Our work focuses on the two SDG’s 12 Responsible Consumption and Production and 13 Climate Action. Our instruments are workshops and labs in the areas of consumer education and social transition.

  

 

 Can you tell more about your activity ?

We are currently working on four projects which convey sustainable lifestyles to a broad and diverse public:

SLE Workshops: our urban “sustainable lifestyle education” workshops empower consumers to influence product design and producer’s ecological standards: Workshops currently offered in Zürich, expansion to other cities planned in 2019.

LIVETOGETHER: a unique holiday program designed to educate travelers to share, economize, respect and become aware of their impact on the planet. Traveler’s camp running from March to July 2018 in Barra Grande, Brazil.

Living lab Zakynthos: our holiday homes in Zakynthos showcase unique sustainable building technologies and playfully motivate travelers to reduce their ecological footprint. First zero waste house ready to be rented in June 2018.

Living lab village Zürich: A cradle to cradle, modular, mobile tiny-home park providing food, energy, water and land autonomy for a zero-waste lifestyle community.

 

What is the local reality about waste and environmental protection in your location?

Datei 02.12.17, 17 18 24

The location of our first traveler’s camp in Barra Grande Brazil is on a peninsula with difficult access. There is a basic waste management system in place directing mixed waste to a landfill in a protected mangrove area. This is a tragedy for the local environment since there are floodings and the local rivers carry landfill waste into mangroves and into the sea. Some private associations try to educate the local people to separate waste and to dispose correctly. Yet, every summer the peninsula has an overload of tourists who litter and stress the local waste management capacity. The beaches of Barra Grande are among the most beautiful and pristine in Brazil, nevertheless, they are affected by considerable plastic pollution – coming from ocean pollution.

 

How do you integrate tourism and sustainability at the same time?

By doing education workshops.

Our LIVETOGETHER program is a 1-week practical training aimed at inducing behavioral change within a group of trendsetters in tourism. The program offers a total 15 weeks during 5 months. The trainings take place in a rented house in a well-known tourism spot. The group is trained by a sustainable lifestyle expert. Participants learn to reduce consumption to the max and live nearly zero waste, leading an inclusive lifestyle, mingling with the local community, sourcing local food and products, cleaning up beaches and helping ecological & social activities.

 

Practical sustainable lifestyle education (SLE) is the most effective driver to tackle overconsumption and related problems such as climate change and environmental degradation  – we offer effective SLE capable to reduce the average person’s footprint up to 70%. Sustainable lifestyles are becoming a worldwide trend – we take advantage of it, turning the trend into a long-term social norm  by using effective behavioral change techniques.

 

And we actually get measurable results!  By training practical, fun and easy solutions for individual lifestyles we managed to gain a lot of fans for our workshops. Our workshops promote role models and trendsetters for sustainable lifestyles. It’s not coaches teaching our participants but real people doing real things. A student of Centre for Sustainable Development of the University of Bern did a survey and wrote a paper on the effectiveness of future.camp® workshops and stated that they have been proven to induce behavioral change.

 

Datei 03.12.17, 07 45 42Why do you partner with My Green Trip?

My Green Trip is a great promotion tool for environmental awareness! It combines the nice things in life with our duty to take care of the planet wherever we are. By promoting sustainable travel destinations and programs My Green Trip helps to give visibility to sustainable tourism offers and at the same time it informs travellers about cool activities on their trips. The cleanup kits offered by My Green Trip are an incentive to act and an easy to use education tool for travellers. It is an excellent complement for future.camp® projects.

 

Do you have a special news currently?

Book our first LIVETOGETHER program for April!! 

 

How can we contact you? 

LIVETOGETHER – Barra Grande, Brazil

Living Lab Zakynthos, Greece