The Green Fins Toolbox: All The Tools You Need to Making Your Diving Business Sustainable
Green Fins provides the only internationally recognised environmental standards to the scuba diving and snorkelling industry. Over 400 operators across six south east Asian countries are currently on board to improve their practices and protect coral reefs by following the environmental code of conduct.
“This is not some “over the counter” accreditation. Their trained staff assessed our dive shop and dive masters on actual dives and made suggestions on how we can improve.” – Savedra Dive Centre
At full scale implementation Green Fins achieves three main objectives; green certifications of dive centres, strengthening regulations, and environmental education for dive staff, divers and government. However, this requires significant time and resources. To tackle this Reef-World, the brains behind Green Fins, have put together a Green Fins ‘Toolbox’ to make it even easier for dive centres around the world to follow these simple best practices.
This Toolbox will be launched at the 2016 Asia Dive Expo (ADEX) and combines all the Green Fins learning materials and guides into a one stop shop of practical solutions. From every day environmental challenges at dive and snorkel centres; such as how to give good environmental briefings, how to be a responsible underwater photographer to why good garbage management in this ocean workplace is important.
These eye catching and fun materials are already helping many dive centres to follow best practice and will be available for download free of charge on the Green Fins website.
“Through Green Fins we learnt how to better protect our marine resources, like not to fish feed and no anchoring. It’s good that Green Fins teaches you why these practices are damaging, we understand it better” – Caera Travel and Tours
In addition to this, there are now three Operational Handbooks available designed to help dive centre managers, local resource managers and national authorities navigate their way towards managing a sustainable diving industry.
The Operational Handbook for Dive and Snorkel Centres will lead business owners and managers through a step by step guide to following the Green Fins Code of Conduct. The Site Level Handbook provides all the information needed to set up Green Fins in a local diving destination for resource managers. Finally, the National Level Handbook provides national authorities with the tips and tricks they need to ignite Green Fins as a national environmental diving programme in their country.
By following environmental standards divers can help to protect their dive sites and the ocean as well as their businesses.
“We make more money as a company by following good environmental practices, we get good feedback on TripAdvisor specifically because of this and therefore attract more customers.” – Evolution Diving Resort
So don’t miss out – visit the free downloads section of the Green Fins website and start following and promoting the Green Fins environmental standards today! Be part of this network of environmental champions and save our reefs!
UK charity The Reef-World Foundation has been working to inspire and empower people to act in conserving and sustainably developing coastal resources in SE Asia and the Indian Ocean for over ten years. As the principle technical partner for the UNEP initiative, Green Fins, Reef-World has worked with national governments, the private sector and local communities to expand the initiative to six countries to drive marine conservation through education and consultation. To find out more about their work, please visit www.reef-world.org.