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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 1995, Banyan Tree Maldives Vabbinfaru is located on the North Malé Atoll, featuring 48 guest villas. They were built on this fascinating island surrounded by shallow crystalline waters and beautiful coral reefs. To prevent damaging the beautiful coral reefs surrounding the island during construction, the solution was to transfer thatched roofs and other pre-fabricated building materials brought in from Indonesia to small boats and barges that could navigate the shallow waters without threatening its delicate marine life. In addition, the villas were built on the footprints of a previous property to preserve existing trees and prevent erosion on the beach.
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. At Vabbinfaru we planted a mixture of 1000 Labernum, Margosa, Sea Trumpet, Fig, Rain, Tamarind, Ashoka, Casuarina, Jambolan, and Laurelwood trees in Haa Alifu and Haadhaalu Atolls on Earth Day, along with 2000 other plants.
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.
We invite every traveller who books a holiday via us to send in a review. Because we don't run the holidays they're completely independent and unedited... remember to read between the lines though, as two people on the same holiday can have different views!
