Maldives beach resort and spa, Banyan Tree Madivaru

As a socially responsible business, Banyan Tree was founded with the core value of driving sustainable development. With the call to arms of embracing the environment and empowering the people, we seek to continue being an agent of social and economic development through responsible tourism. Our triple bottom line (economy, society and environment) help direct our sustainable development by inspiring associates, guests, and partners to take a wider consideration encompassing a long term view when making business decisions.

Environment
Since its founding, Banyan Tree has sought to protect the natural environment. The importance of safeguarding the environment is central within our goal of sharing the original beauty of any location with guests and friends. This includes ensuring each resort fits into the local setting in a sensitive, meaningful manner.

Opened in 2007, Banyan Tree Madivaru features six tented pool villas, the first such concept in the Maldives, set amid white sandy beaches, a beautiful shallow lagoon, and breathtaking house reefs. Banyan Tree Madivaru was built without removing large trees and with only the exact footprint of each villa cleared. To avoid the loss of any trees and provide the natural means for absorbing atmospheric carbon, any trees within a villa’s planned footprint were transplanted to different areas of the island, usually towards the beach. Transplanting such trees towards the beach also helped reduce the light visible from the ocean thus helping protect the island’s status as a natural turtle nesting ground.

All boats at Madivaru have 4-stroke engines that are more environmentally friendly than standard 2-stroke engines which inherently allow fuel to leak via the combustion process. Tended by a team of only 25 multi-talented associates who are expertly trained, the resort is geared for low environmental impact, including the treatment plant for waste for the 6 tented villas.

Banyan Tree increased its commitment to tackle the issues of climate change by launching Greening Communities in 2007. Banyan Tree’s group wide environmental initiative targeting climate change, Greening Communities challenges our resorts to plant 2,000 new trees per year for the next 10 years. While the initiative will offset a small amount of the globally produced atmospheric carbon dioxide, the main goal is to drive greater awareness of climate change among our communities, associates, and guests. We started with 7 initial locations in Thailand (Phuket and Bangkok), Indonesia (Bintan), Maldives, Seychelles, China (Lijiang), and Australia (Cairns) in 2007 and will continue ramping up in the coming years. Resorts were tasked to plant non invasive species on protected locations such as schools or parks where any newly planted trees have a significantly high likelihood of long term longevity.

In 2007, Banyan Tree launched a group wide effort to monitor and systematically reduce the carbon emissions from its resorts. While much of this effort was more internally focused to fine tune and enhance the overall environmental management strategy, this effort has lead to a programme launching in 2008 to reduce energy and water consumption by each resort while enhancing waste management practices at each location. The overall goal is to reduce consumption and carbon emissions by 10% every year from 2006 levels between 2008 and 2010.

Formalised in the last part of 2007, the group environmental management strategy requires each resort to have environmental management officers specifically to monitor power consumption, water consumption and waste production and reduce consumption by at least 10% every year.

Community
With the mandate of empowering people, Banyan Tree is quick to recognise the necessity of building community capacity, in every location that we are in. As an agent of social and economic development, we realise the potential of tourism to hire from the local workforce, giving training and marketable skills to raise the overall level of community prosperity.

Sustaining village development, preserving and promoting traditional cultures and crafts are part of Banyan Tree Gallery’s business ethos as a socially responsible tourism retailer. Committed to showcasing and supporting community-friendly and eco-friendly products and projects, we have cultivated a wide network of over 40 village producers and project partners around the region.