Most innovative environmental strategy, finalist: &Beyond.
When &Beyond started out nearly 20 years ago, great importance was placed on ecotourism.
The group is now enjoying the benefits of its ‘early adopter” role and is considered a global case study of how an inclusive and holistic environmental strategy can deliver real business value. The company was founded on three core principles: care of the land, care of the wildlife and care of the people.
Today &Beyond boasts 46 luxury lodges in Africa and India, with just 850 paying beds. The company points out this is smaller than a medium-size city hotel.
But the land it helps to maintain extends to more than 3.5-million hectares and it applies its low-impact, highyield methodology to maintain the natural integrity of the land and the communities who live on it.
&Beyond applies its environmental principles from the start of all new projects. Green architecture is a basic requirement, which incorporates certain fundamentals, such as using natural light as much as possible, solar energy to heat water, the use of recycled materials and designing buildings around natural structures such as trees and rocks.
Technology is incorporated where necessary and many of the camps now use inverter generators, Lilliput sewerage systems and grey-water solutions. The camps even provide guests with remote control switches allowing them to turn their electricity on and off before and after game drives, which has resulted in a 50% electricity saving. But it is sometimes the simplest initiatives that make the biggest difference.
‘The problem with having so many of our lodges in remote areas is finding technologies that are robust and simple. Sometimes we have to revert to a plain ‘switch it off’ mentality. And this is not necessarily a bad thing because, even if you are using the most sophisticated technology, running it is still consuming energy,” said Claire Howse, sustainability director of &Beyond.
A culture of conservation pervades the staff at &Beyond. Howse said that the staff complement outweighed the number of guests at any of the lodges and it was the staff who were in the position to effect the biggest energy savings.
‘We have attracted an amazing group of people who embrace our philosophies wholeheartedly and are often the ones who come up with new initiatives to help us become more green.”
Phinda Private Game Reserve collects three tons of glass, three tons of tin cans and 4.5 tons of plastic and paper for recycling offsite a year. But rather than seeing the income from this going to a private company, &Beyond set up a community recycling business that is run by 10 community members. It is this inclusive culture that has been pointed to as &Beyond’s greatest success.
The management of &Beyond believes firmly that conservation cannot exist in isolation of the people living on the land, many of whom are part of the country’s most vulnerable communities. Ongoing monitoring of &Beyond’s carbon footprint has enabled its management to see quickly which initiatives work and which do not.
Detailed monthly reports and graphs on energy consumption are drawn up for each individual camp and, based on this, changes are made on the fly, eliminating long periods of inefficient activity. But the most important work happens outside the gates of the luxury lodges, in the vast tracks of wilderness that is managed by the company.
Much of the territory run by &Beyond was not pristine when it was taken over and rehabilitation is ongoing in many of the areas, which were once farmed or overgrazed. Exotic species are removed, indigenous flora is planted and animal ecosystems are re introduced.
Phinda Reserve alone spent R2.5-million eradicating an alien plant species that was threatening the fragile ecosystems in the area.
&Beyond is fortunate that it has had nearly two decades to refine and fine-tune its environmental strategies and the fact that it has resisted the business temptation to increase rooms and revenues shows its understanding that real ecotourism is always about putting the environment first.
Perhaps Gandhi put it more succinctly when he said: ‘There is a sufficiency for man’s need, but not for man’s greed.” It seems &Beyond has found its adequate sufficiency.