As we enter a new year, Andaman Discoveries is looking forward to continuing our goal of being transparent with our sustainable practices. We completed our Travelife Audit and were awarded Travelife Certified. The process was extremely educational in looking at our company as a whole and how sustainability fits into our company’s core functions and how it will be monitored and evaluated to ensure continued success, implementation and growth. Areas that we really updated and worked on involved our human recourse management to ensure that our policies and procedures were documented and available for all staff to access and understand their role in upholding sustainability within the company. This also entailed making a detailed sustainability monitoring and evaluation system so that we are able to appropriately record our sustainability efforts. Examples are recording monthly energy consumption, GHG carbon emission, water usage and waste management (paper, glass and plastic recycled). Another area we improved on was updating contracts and guidelines for all of our partner agencies to follow to ensure that we are working with like- minded sustainable: excursion providers, accommodations, and transportation and partner agencies. We uphold sustainable measures like animal welfare, child protection, protection of local natural resources and our sustainability clause in our contracts. We also have put in place sustainability checklists and policies for all of our partner agencies as listed above so that we can monitor their sustainability initiatives.
When working with local communities, we are already using low impact forms of travel. But we recognize and want to continue to build the capacity and knowledge of local communities by increasing sustainability awareness. To do this, we will be doing a sustainability training to help the communities create their own sustainability policy and checklist to use in the future. Currently, we have an accommodation homestay sustainability checklist that we would like to give to the homestays to use and go over to see if they feel they are meeting appropriate standards. We will also touch on animal welfare and child protection policies.
Another area that we improved on was compiling our sustainable initiatives and reporting them to the public so that we are transparent. You can check out our latest sustainability report here. https://www.andamandiscoveries.com/sustainability-public-report/
It is an exciting time as we move into 2019, with an updated sustainability system put in place; we look forward to sharing our initiatives with everyone throughout the yearJ
