The tourism industry has had to adapt as the winters get shorter, summers get hotter, algae blooms endanger Manitoba’s lakes and a whole host of other environmental challenges become more common. Climate change is impacting the environment, and as a result, travel preferences are shifting: Booking.com’s 2023 Sustainable Travel Report found that 76% of travellers want to travel more sustainably over the coming 12 months.

What’s the large-scale answer to adapting? Sustainable tourism, which is “tourism that takes full account of its current and future economic, social and environmental impacts, addressing the needs of visitors, the industry, the environment and host communities" (according to the World Tourism Organization).

Before you get overwhelmed, here’s the good news: There’s plenty of proof in Manitoba that pursuing sustainable business practices offers competitive and economic advantages while also helping to preserve our province’s natural resource and spaces.

Take the Winnipeg Folk Festival, for example. In 2023, the Festival attracted almost 75,000 people to Birds Hill Provincial Park. Despite its size, it offers free water stations instead of selling bottled water, has an extensive composting and recycling program, encourages vendors to offer Local, Organic and Fair Trade (LOFT) food, feeds everyone at the backstage kitchen a vegetarian meal on the Friday of the Festival, powers everything using renewable energy and does so much more.

“Folk music has always been concerned with its world, and its fans care about the environment,” said Valerie Shantz, Executive Director of the Winnipeg Folk Festival. “Everything we do in terms of building our site every year is mindful of the fact that we want to return it to as much of a natural state as we can at the end.”

This extensive commitment to sustainability won the Winnipeg Folk Festival the 2018 Clearwater Award at the International Folk Music Awards and the 2023 Tourism Award Winnipeg | Manitoba for sustainability.

“You choose what you invest in, and we’ve chosen this. We've had really good feedback on it, and we’re learning and adjusting every year,” said Shantz.

No matter what services or experiences you offer or how sustainable you already are, there’s always room to improve. Even ecotourism businesses, which facilitate a connection with nature through observation and education, are often presumed to be inherently environmentally friendly. Garrett Fache, owner of Wild Loon Adventure Company, said this is a common misconception.

“Going out and paddling isn't inherently green…I see ecotourism as a way to advocate for these spaces and to expose more people to them so they become passionate about enacting major change,” said Fache. “Businesses like mine give people the chance to fall in love with moments that will stick with them. In my mind, if you have something that sticks with you, you’re more likely to want to act on it.”

Fache goes to great lengths to make his overnight paddling and top rope climbing excursions as environmentally friendly as possible by organizing carpooling, picking up trash and bringing back extra waste, eliminating as many single-use plastics as possible and replacing them with reusable options and properly recycling. He shares all of these practices with his adventurers, in addition to facilitating educational moments about the natural environment during these trips.

“Even teaching people how to pull a paddle…the backcountry provides these moments of clarity and relaxation where there’s no cell service,” says Fache. “They can be bored and use their imaginations again…these natural spaces give us so much.”

Fache’s grandfather was a farmer and taught him that you have to give back to the land if you take from it. This ideology is baked into his business and he sees environmental stewardship as necessary to ensure the future of his business and businesses like it, and to protect these spaces for generations to come.

Churchill Wild was also built on a sense of ecological responsibility and respect for the land that was passed down from previous generations. The owners of Churchill Wild, Mike and Jeanne Reimer, pioneered the concept of walking arctic safaris 30 years ago. This knowledge came from experience working at Doug and Helen’s (Jeanne’s parents) goose hunting lodge way back in the day.

As they returned from a hunt, they were often followed by polar bears, which taught them how to understand polar bear movements and behaviour. Now, people come from all over the world to approach polar bears on foot (up to 100 meters) and have other immersive wildlife encounters.

"Being ground-level with polar bears establishes respect and an emotional bond, as guests are truly immersed in their natural habitat and can see firsthand how they live. It just creates a better connection to the polar bears which guests will take home with them, they might feel more inclined to want to protect the environment, which helps the bears long term,” said Maggie Cole, Marketing Manager for Churchill Wild. “We try to eliminate any gas that we're using for vehicles. We do offer one-day ATV and boat excursions, but they all have energy-efficient motors.”

Above and beyond the ethical perspective, in some cases, it simply makes economic sense to make the more sustainable choice, regardless if you’re offering an ecotourism experience or not.

Churchill Wild’s three eco-lodges were built using local lumber and recycled materials, designed to let in as much natural light as possible to reduce the need for artificial light and are almost completely solar-powered. These green choices will save the business money for the next 30 years.

“Recently, sustainability has been the big buzz word that seems to be top of mind in the travel industry. We didn’t do it to please anyone. We’ve felt this was the right thing to do from the start, and although it’s more costly in the beginning to implement, it will provide us with advantages in the end,” said Cole.

Whether you adopt it going forward or rebuild and embed it from the ground up, sustainable tourism is the future of this industry. Any tourism business, facility, event or attraction can become sustainable. It’s not about what your business offers or does, it’s about how you do it.

Read about eco-focused travel experiences in Manitoba here.