These are the top countries for ethical travellers

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With the world already feeling the effects of climate change, consumers are beginning to throw their weight (and money) behind brands with ethical practices.

And travel destinations are not immune.

Travellers are looking for destinations that are fair to their natural environments, their people and their culture.

With this in mind, the Latin America Travel Company (LATC) created a Travel Morality Index, by analysing a variety of different factors that affect the ethicality and morality of a destination – and thus affect the enthusiasm towards visiting by ethical travellers.

LATC researched surveys, blog posts, social media, polls, and more in order to come up with a list of important factors that need to be considered when assessing the morality of a destination.

These included elements such as the human rights protection score of a country, the amount of animal rights legislation that was in place as of 1st March 2017, the gender equality rates – pretty much everything that should be considered when considering how ethically good a place is.

They then ranked countries around the world who offered the best of the best for these categories.

Germany came in at number one, the highest ranking for animal welfare, human rights and workers rights.

Berlin

IStock/7000

The country scored the highest possible score of 1 in the ITUC Global Rights Index, with “irregular violation of [workers] rights”, making it one of only 12 countries to get this score. Germany also came 17th in the Global Peace Index, and 9th in the positive peace report.

Following Germany, the top 10 countries are:

Austria
Iceland
Netherlands
New Zealand
Canada
Belgium
Finland
Czech Republic
Denmark

Austria and Iceland ranked highly for similar reasons to Germany, although Iceland was awarded a very low score for animal welfare protection, with only basic national laws in place to protect animals.

On the other hand, Iceland had the highest score for human rights protection in 2014 – although it has gone down since 2012.

Iceland also came 6th for gender inequality and 1st in the Global Peace Index.

Iceland/ IStock/ robas

Iceland/ IStock/ robas

Austria also scored highly across these categories, coming 3rd in the Global Peace Index, and ranking among the top 12 countries in the world for workers’ rights.

Sadly, Australia was ranked at 13, scoring particularly low in animal welfare, workers rights and human rights protection.

Check out the full list here.

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