The one thing I'd change is... by Rochelle Turner, B Corp Impact Manager at Intrepid Travel

Should we be investing more in nature? Rochelle Turner, B Corp Impact Manager at Intrepid Travel thinks we should, and that one way to do that could be to give nature a royalty when it's used in photos.

Rochelle points out that something like this is already available in the music industry, see this article by Mark Savage for the BBC: Nature officially becomes a musician, earning royalties for environmental causes

I caught up with Rochelle at the ABTA 2025 Travel Conference in Calvià, Mallorca last week and asked her to answer in less than 60 seconds, "What's the one thing you'd change in travel, given the climate and nature emergencies?" Here is her full reply:

https://video.wixstatic.com/video/581fc9_7dbbf3b81003439a909039155f443426/720p/mp4/file.mp4

"The one thing I'd like to see changed is a greater investment in nature. In my lifetime, nature has been depleted by about 70% of all species that are just gone. Now we need to see a tripling of investment into nature for land conservation, and to get rid of all of the problems that we've done with land degradation.

"Now, one way potentially to do this is by investing more. And when we send people away on photo shoots, we send models. We value their time and we pay them. But what do we do about when those people are on a beach, up a mountain, or next to a lake or a river? We don't pay the nature for those pictures.

"Why can't we? Why can't we give nature a royalty for the images? Just like when we pay people? And the music industry does this – the music industry pays a royalty when nature is sampled. Tourism can do it to."

🙏 Rochelle

This post is part of a series of interviews with people across the travel and tourism industry, where I ask them to answer in less than 60 seconds, "What's the one thing you'd change in travel, given the climate and nature emergencies?"