A new certification scheme wants to separate genuine sustainability from the towel-reuse card on your pillow. I went looking for the detail behind the headline. [COVER IMAGE GOES HERE – set as WordPress Featured Image only, not embedded in body. Description: Dragon Bridge in Da Nang lit up at night during a fireworks display, editor-owned
A Few Words From Me The biggest story coming out of the region this week is the weather itself. Green season brings a wash of colour to the region yet it can also prove to be a wash out, with lives disrupted through incessant rain that brings flooding to low-lying areas. Laos is dealing with
Nakai-Nam Theun is being assessed for international recognition. Its most famous resident hasn’t been confirmed alive since 2013. No scientist has ever seen a saola in the wild. Not once, not briefly, not through binoculars from a safe distance. Everything known about the animal comes from a handful of camera-trap images, a few individuals that
A decade of peer-reviewed research and a protection law barely a year old point to two very different answers on how to see the world’s biggest fish responsibly. Ninety-three percent. That is the proportion of tourists at Oslob, in southern Cebu, who were found swimming closer to a whale shark than the town’s own ordinance
Southeast Asia spent fifty years destroying its most useful coastline. It’s finally growing back, and Vietnam has the receipts. Nobody puts a mangrove forest on a postcard. Ask someone to picture Southeast Asia and you get white sand, a longtail boat, maybe a temple roof catching the light. Nobody pictures a tangle of grey roots
Three new UNESCO biosphere reserves landed in June, including a first for Timor-Leste. What the designation is actually betting on, and what it asks of anyone who visits. Three places joined a very short list this June: UNESCO biosphere reserves, one of them a first for its country entirely. A biosphere reserve isn’t just a
Thailand tested its sustainable tourism model in Krabi. Now the same blueprint is heading north, and it changes how you should plan a Chiang Mai trip. Five years ago, Krabi became the testing ground for an idea Thailand’s tourism authority wasn’t sure would work: that a destination could be rebuilt around certified low-impact routes, trained
GSTC, Green Key, Green Hotel Plus: what these logos actually mean, and how to tell a genuine credential from a marketing sticker Booking.com’s own data puts the figure above 80%: most travellers now say they want to stay somewhere sustainable. Hotels across Southeast Asia have responded with a wall of green badges on their booking
Around the Region Not everything that calls itself ethical always is. Operators and outlets across the region claim green credentials that don’t survive much scrutiny – and those of us seeking genuinely sustainable travel experiences know exactly what that looks like. The region is waking up to the reality that visitors don’t just want eco-friendly
Visitor numbers at Angkor climb sharply from mid-June. The next few weeks are one of the best opportunities of the year to experience the world’s largest religious monument with space to breathe – if you plan it properly. There are over a thousand temples inside the Angkor Archaeological Park. Most visitors see three. They queue
Malaysia and Vietnam Just Added Six Parks to an Exclusive List. The Badge Is the Easy Part.
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Da Nang Just Wrote a 219-Point Rulebook for What “Green” Actually Means. Here’s What’s in It.
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