BIODIVERSITY PARTNERSHIPS

As well playing an essential role in the Nature Positive approach, undertaking actions to protect, restore and enhance biodiversity can bring many other benefits to Travel & Tourism businesses. These could include:

• Opportunities for experiences and products linked to biodiversity actions
• Additional communications / public relation opportunities
• Enhanced appeal to environmentally-conscious clients
• Increased motivation for environmentally-conscious staff
• Local engagement to enrich client experience
• Unique, meaningful activities to offer clients
• Improved relationships with communities around destinations
• Reinforce brand identity with practical efforts aligned with core principles 

The key to unlocking this treasure chest of opportunities is finding suitable partners – from NGOs and community groups to government agencies and academic institutions.

These partnerships present great opportunities for Travel & Tourism operations in the same locations and with a similar focus. ANIMONDIAL carefully selects and filters each potential partner, ensuring a thorough understanding of what they do and how they work. We also support them with networking opportunities, capacity-building and professional guidance and sustainable development. You can see our list of current members on this site, or contact us to identify any that you might want to work with.

As well as introducing you to our existing members, APN can help track down projects and partners in any destination, protecting specific animal species or natural habitat of your choice, or even supporting local communities that live alongside wildlife. We can help any travel company to find suitable partners in any given destination to fit strategic priorities (e.g. blue carbon), address identified areas of impact (e.g. habitat restoration) or align with national biodiversity strategies. We have many years of experience working with conservation field projects, community organisations, national wildlife agencies, research projects and more. Every location is different, with its own challenges and opportunities. Making the right match involves understanding the tourism operation itself – how it works, what it needs and what it has to offer – and doing careful research into all the possible partners in and around the relevant destination.

Typically, we will start with an assessment of your business’ impacts and opportunities and an understanding of your Nature Positive strategic goals. We can also provide you with a deeper understanding of the destination itself, the biodiversity in a given area and the likely threats faced. Once we have clarified what natural protection and restoration is needed, the type of partner the business is looking for and what it can bring to the partnership, then we can research individual opportunities. As well as finding potential NGO and other partners, we can contact them and lead them through our approval process to check that they are credible and effective. We can also work with your team or destination partners to familiarise them with the Nature Positive approach, the priorities in their location and how to make the most of their local partnership potential.

Travel & Tourism businesses may choose to give back to nature in a range of ways, such as:

• Supporting locally-focused activities in their destinations, potentially linked to:
  • specific sites (such as national parks)
  • high profile species or habitats (such as tigers or coral reefs)
  • local priorities (such as regenerative agriculture or water management)
• Focusing on nature protection issues identified in the organisation’s Nature Positive strategy, such as:
  • blue carbon (creating carbon dioxide sinks in marine habitats)
  • animal welfare (such as caring for animals rescued from illegal trade)
  • rewilding (enhancing biodiversity and natural processes across varied landscapes)
  • areas in which the business has identified a significant negative impact
• Aligning with national priorities such as the national biodiversity strategies set up by each country as part of their international biodiversity conservation commitments

Visitors to Barbados often marvel at the beauty and diversity of the nation’s amazing coral reefs. Most of them want to know that such activities are conducted responsibly, but a partnership with Barbados Environmental Conservation Trust could offer them so much more. By connecting with the BioRock coral restoration project, you could demonstrate your commitment to rebuilding the damaged areas of reef that have been devastated by unsustainable tourism and fishing. You could engage customers and staff with regular updates on the project, promoting the project’s conservation messages while inspiring visitors and local people with positive stories about your work to support nature. Visits from the project team could provide a special insight for those who want to learn more, with guests going home more enthused, encouraging their friends to follow in their footsteps and more likely to return themselves. Similarly, a commitment to offer only sustainably-sourced seafood could be enhanced through a relationship with the DigiFish initiative, which provides technology to support local fishing practices. Even just sitting on the beach soaking up the sunshine and atmosphere can be enhanced by knowing that your downtime is helping the Barbados Sea Turtle Project to protect nesting beaches, incubate eggs that need relocating and ensure that hatchlings safely reach the sea.

Increasingly, responsible travel companies are moving away from visits to captive animal facilities, particularly dolphinaria. Refusing to support these highly questionable exhibits is an important step, but it would send an even stronger message to actually promote options for rescuing dolphins and other marine mammals from a life in captivity. This is one of the functions that the Aegean Marine Life Sanctuary aims to perform. The rescue centre and veterinary facility will take in, treat and release injured wild animals, as well as providing a vast enclosed area for captive dolphins to get used to living in the sea before being returned to a life in the wild. A partnership with this visionary project could provide news, insight and authenticity for a travel business with a strong animal welfare message.

The possibilities are almost endless, and can provide any responsible travel company with a way to demonstrate their commitment, enhance their contribution and make a clear positive impact. Visiting gorillas in Central Africa can be a life-changing experience, and one which contributes to local conservation efforts through park and guide fees. But how much more inspiring would it be to know your trip was also changing the life of a rescued orphan gorilla being cared for at the Ape Action Africa sanctuary in Cameroon? A trip to Scotland could be perfectly complemented with a contribution to local conservation and nature restoration efforts through the Highlands and Islands Environment Fund – and possibly even a visit to the field site itself. The list goes on …