'Tis the season for giving, and the international climate conference in Copenhagen served as a stark reminder of the travel industry's responsibility to give back.

During the convention, held in Denmark's capital Dec. 7 through 18, the United Nations World Tourism Organization and the World Travel and Tourism Council held an event titled "Addressing the challenges of climate change: perspectives from the tourism and the travel sector."

"Tourism and travel is also a vector of climate change, accounting for approximately 5% of global carbon dioxide emissions," the UNWTO wrote in a background paper for the Copenhagen conference. "By 2035, under a 'business as usual' scenario, carbon dioxide emissions from global tourism are projected to increase by 130%."

Robin Tauck, founder of R. Tauck & Partners, a public-private venture dedicated to sustainable travel, traveled to Copenhagen to attend the UNWTO and WTTC event. "This will be our industry's biggest challenge over the next 20 to 40 years," Tauck wrote in an email to friends and colleagues about her experience in Copenhagen.

While the UNWTO and WTTC are working to address climate change on a larger level, there are ways for individual companies to promote environmental awareness on a smaller level.

In December 2010, luxury tour operator Abercrombie & Kent will be hosting its third "philanthropic journey mission," a 14-day itinerary titled "Fighting Climate Change in Antarctica Aboard Le Boreal." Expert naturalists will guide wildlife observation on the 199-passenger Le Boreal. The itinerary includes a visit to a working research station.

"With rapid warming now well documented on the Antarctic Peninsula, the break-out of the Wilkins Ice Shelf [in April] raises the number of major ice sheet break-outs to occur along the Antarctic Peninsula to nine over the past fifty years," wrote Dr. James McClintock, a scientist and professor of polar and marine biology at the University of Alabama, Birmingham, who is leading the expedition. "The increasing disintegration of major ice sheets along the Peninsula is being accompanied by a similar rapid retreat in the annual sea ice, the full extent of which has receded some 40% over the past quarter-century."

Will taking a small group of people to see and experience these changes in Antarctica make a difference? Well, it's a start. And it's an example of something a travel company can do to participate in the climate change discussion. Something to give back.