MAD Travel

22/12/2025

29/11/2025

After the tiring various altercop sessions, we hosted Tipsy With Sustainability to get everyone eating delicious fruit and making friends while creating new cocktails.

We had such a great time meeting and talking to like minded and hearted professionals at .ph . Great ideas and collaborations coming your way! Thank you to everyone who participated and waited out the Friday traffic with us!

15/11/2025

Aetas Bounce Back After Storms Destroy Agriculture Crops:

In 2024 a huge storm hit Zambales and a lot of the rice fields were flooded with volcanic ash. After the flood, the fields were no longer useable for rice. Due to hard times, some members looked at charcoal (cutting trees) as a means to get by. These were hard times.

We met with the community and agreed that focusing on root crops was a good strategy as they had local demand, and the plants could survive in the sandy ash.

Early in 2025, Amon Foundation came in to fund the root crops, taro and ginger.

The local governement also stepped in, allowing the community to sell in their barangay 1x a week - creating additional access to market - also providing cheap organic produce to the locals of San Felipe, Zambales. (Thank you Brgy Captain!)

Despite the storms in the last few months, the community was focused on a climate resilient crop, and one that grew well in their volcanic ash soil. The result: a thriving local, organic economy - and numerous smiles.

Last week, we saw the community happily selling root crops and other native items to guests, even sharing that they were earning as much as 1500/day during harvest season, because they are able to sell their crops at local markets.

This photo was 18 mos in the making - and a pleasant surprise after the barrage of storms.

With a small amount of money, hard work and the right hearts, we can create opportunities for wealth generation and climate resilience in our own towns. Thank you Amon Foundation!

Let's replicate this! ☺️

09/11/2025

In the course of our quest to reduce flood and restore forests, we noticed many people believe that we cannot calculate the amount of water we need to manage during storms, and thus cannot accurately prepare for them. This is a continuation. of our previous post on mm/hour of rain - how much water do our cities and towns actually absorb?

Absorptive capacity of water of different land surfaces: (flat land with 0 slope)

Standard Concrete/Asphalt: 1mm/hour/sqm
Compacted Soil: 3mm/hour/sqm
Grass: 10mm/hour/sqm
Small/Young Forest/Woodland Park: 50mm/hour/sqm
Old Growth Forest: +300mm/hour/sqm

Our team prepared this information in hopes that we can all take steps towards managing flood water. This is especially important to those who influence space: engineers, architects, governments, land owners and developers - those who directly or indirectly decide what our land surface will look like.

They can use this to calculate the safe amount of concrete/earth/grass/forest in a space, town, city or province, assuming that today’s storms will be like Tino and Uwan who bring +200mm of rain in 24 hours or less.

Let's plant trees, but we are also asking for help to share more sustainability math like this with grade school, high school and college systems so that everyone understands the effects of climate change, and how we can build a country that's prepared for it.

Thank you to all who have helped us (especially ) plant over 100,000 trees since 2016. Send us a message if you want to get involved, want more information, or want to collaborate! Let's take care of nature, and our home planet.

*absorption rates will vary based on kind of soil, health of soil and size of plants. Slopes will also reduce water absorption rates

**information is based on research with several sources, including plantation farmers, FAO and other farming websites. Actual numbers may vary site to site but this gives you an indicator of how big the changes are from forest to concrete.

Please share info with relevant organizations and groups that influence the land in your hometown and the country :)

09/11/2025

Typhoon Tino and Uwan are bringing in +200mm of rain in 24 hours - an amount that creates flooding. However, it's really hard to understand what 200mm really means.

We checked resources of www.fao.org to better understand and imagine what this means - and this information has been very helpful when we make decisions to cancel or proceed with events during the rainy season. It's also the same sustainability and practical math that we hope everyone in the Philippines can learn. (introduced during our programs)

200mm in 24 hours means 200 liters of water per square meter!

If you want to learn about the solutions to handling this much water, check out our next post.

18/09/2025

Join us this International Coastal Cleanup Month at Las Piñas–Parañaque Wetland Park 🐦🌿

🗓 Sept 28, 2025 (Sun) | ⏰ 7:30AM–12NN

✅ Waste reduction talk by a TEDx speaker
✅ Coastal cleanup with fellow nature-lovers

🎟 FREE — just bring food to share (no single-use plastics 🍃).
📍 Register now

Let’s clean, connect, and celebrate the coast together! 🌎💚

18/09/2025

We recently ran a waste reduction workshop with Pasay City National Science High School!

It was exciting to see students come up with ideas to create zero waste /reduced waste versions of the following events

1. School fair
2. Regional sports competition
3. Field trip
4. Island hopping vacation
5. Huge kids party of a 1 year old (first born)
6. Date

We also fed them healthy local food, catered with zero plastic waste!

Events design, material science, and climate math all rolled into one half day session! Thank you Accenture Philippines for connecting us to this school!

For those looking for problem solving workshops related to waste and carbon - please let us know as run workshops for students, governement , hospitality groups and corporations!