Tourism’s Carbon Story Is Bigger Than Its Footprint
- Craig Mitchell
- 13 hours ago
- 6 min read
There’s a moment on a game drive when you suddenly realise just how quiet the bush can be.
The engine is switched off. The last vibration of the Land Rover disappears. Somewhere in the distance a francolin calls, a breeze moves through the grass and, if you’re lucky, an elephant is feeding somewhere nearby.
It feels untouched.
But keeping places like this wild comes at a cost — and increasingly, tourism is being asked to understand exactly what that cost looks like.
We tend to think about tourism and climate change in fairly simple terms. Flights burn fuel. Safari vehicles use diesel. Lodges use electricity. Generators run in remote areas. Food has to be transported, rooms have to be cleaned and hot water doesn't magically appear.
All of that creates carbon emissions.
But there is another side to the story that is particularly important in Africa.
Tourism can also help keep wild landscapes standing.
And that, according to the people behind a new Southern African carbon measurement initiative, is a story worth telling.
Two sides of tourism’s carbon story
Verified Impact, the tourism-specific carbon measurement and verification standard being developed through the kimkim Climate Action Pilot Programme, is looking beyond simply asking how much carbon a lodge produces.
The programme is asking a much bigger question:
How efficiently can tourism create economic value while protecting the landscapes that make tourism possible in the first place?
Duncan Pritchard, Director of ETC Africa, which is the carbon measurement and verification partner for Verified Impact, believes the conversation needs to move beyond emissions alone.
Across Southern Africa, tourism provides an economic reason for large areas of natural habitat to remain intact. Those landscapes aren't just spectacular backdrops for photographs and safari drives. Their vegetation and soils store carbon, support biodiversity, protect water systems and maintain ecological processes.
In other words, wild places are part of our climate infrastructure.
And that changes the conversation.
Tourism needs to reduce the emissions it creates, absolutely. But it also needs to recognise the enormous environmental value generated when tourism makes keeping natural landscapes intact economically viable.
Why measuring carbon actually matters
Carbon footprints can sometimes feel like another complicated number that gets added to an already complicated tourism business.
How much electricity did we use?
How much diesel?
How many kilometres did the vehicles travel?
What about staff transport, food, laundry and waste?
And once you've got all those numbers, what do you actually do with them?
This is where Verified Impact is trying to make the information more useful.
Rather than simply producing a carbon footprint, the programme compares tourism properties against similar African operations.
And that matters.
Imagine two safari lodges both reporting 12 kilograms of CO₂e per guest bed night.
On paper, that's simply a number.
But what happens when you discover that a comparable lodge is operating at 9kg, while another is at 25kg?
Suddenly the number becomes a question.
Why?
Is the lodge less energy efficient? Is it running generators? Is its location forcing longer supply chains? Are its game drives using more fuel? Is occupancy affecting the result?
That's when carbon accounting becomes management information rather than another report sitting in a drawer.
Africa needs an African benchmark
One of the interesting aspects of Verified Impact is that it isn't relying solely on international tourism averages.
That makes sense.
Running a luxury hotel in a European city is very different from operating a remote safari lodge in Southern Africa.
A lodge might be completely off-grid. It may rely on solar and backup generators. Supplies might travel hundreds of kilometres over dirt roads. Game-drive vehicles could be covering large distances every day.
Those realities need to be taken into account.
Verified Impact is building a dataset around African tourism operations, creating a more meaningful picture of what good carbon performance looks like in our part of the world.
And some of the early numbers are fascinating.
According to Pritchard, properties connected to the electricity grid in the current dataset are averaging around 3.6 times the carbon emissions per bed night of comparable off-grid properties.
One of the major reasons is the carbon intensity of South Africa's electricity supply.
That doesn't automatically mean off-grid is better in every situation. It simply shows why context matters.
The surprising culprit on safari
Here's one that might surprise you.
When we think about a lodge's biggest sources of emissions, we'd probably point fingers at the kitchen, laundry or hot-water systems.
But in safari operations, one of the biggest contributors can be something much more enjoyable:
the game drive.
Those early-morning and late-afternoon drives are, of course, one of the reasons guests come to the bush in the first place.
But vehicles burn fuel.
And depending on how drives are planned and managed, vehicle emissions can become one of the largest parts of a lodge's operational footprint.
That doesn't mean we should stop driving into the bush.
Far from it.
It means we should start asking smarter questions about how those drives are managed.
Vehicle utilisation, routing, distances travelled and operational discipline can all make a difference.
And sometimes the answer doesn't require buying a fleet of shiny new electric safari vehicles.
The behavioural dividend
This is perhaps one of the most encouraging parts of the story.
Verified Impact is identifying what it describes as a "behavioural dividend" — emissions reductions that can come from changing the way a business operates rather than spending huge amounts of money on new technology.
Switching things off.
Managing energy better.
Using vehicles more efficiently.
Looking carefully at unnecessary journeys.
Improving operational discipline.
These aren't particularly glamorous solutions.
There’s no shiny solar panel to photograph or fancy piece of technology to put in the brochure.
But they can make a difference.
And for many tourism businesses, especially smaller operators, that matters.
Not every lodge has the capital to immediately undertake a major infrastructure upgrade. But almost every business can start looking more closely at how it uses energy and fuel.
Keeping Africa wild has value
And this is where the story gets really interesting.
Tourism doesn't only consume resources.
Done properly, it can also create an economic argument for protecting them.
A functioning lodge employs people. It buys products and services from surrounding communities. It contributes to conservation costs. It pays concession fees. It creates demand for guides, rangers, mechanics, farmers, suppliers and countless other businesses.
Most importantly, it can give an economic value to a landscape that depends on remaining natural.
Take away the wildlife. Remove the wilderness. Replace the habitat with something else.
And much of the tourism economy disappears with it.
That's why reducing tourism's own carbon footprint isn't simply about making the industry look greener.
It is about making tourism a more efficient and sustainable mechanism for protecting the very places we travel to experience.
As Pritchard puts it, the objective isn't simply to make tourism lower-carbon. It's to maximise the conservation and economic value tourism creates while minimising the carbon footprint required to create it.
For anyone who spends time in Africa's wild places, that's a pretty important distinction.
From numbers to better decisions
Tourism Month traditionally celebrates the things we can easily count.
Visitor numbers.
Jobs.
Foreign income.
Room nights.
Spend.
But perhaps there's another number we should increasingly be paying attention to:
How much environmental value are we creating for the carbon we produce?
That is a much harder question.
And there isn't going to be one answer for every lodge, campsite, safari operator or tourism business.
But measuring is where the conversation begins.
Benchmarking makes the information useful.
And using that information to change the way we operate is where the real value lies.
For me, this is what responsible tourism should ultimately be about.
Not pretending that travelling through Africa has no environmental footprint. It does.
But understanding that footprint, reducing it where we can, and making sure that the tourism economy continues to give wild places a reason to remain wild.
Because somewhere out there, beyond the lodge, beyond the road and beyond the lights, there's still a piece of Africa that doesn't care about our spreadsheets.
The elephants still need their space.
The grasslands still need to breathe.
The rivers still need to flow.
And those wild places are worth far more than the carbon numbers on a report.
They are Africa's inheritance.
And perhaps our job is to make sure we leave enough of it behind for the next generation to experience that magical moment when the engine stops, the bush goes quiet and you realise just how lucky we are to still have places like this.
About Verified Impact
Verified Impact is the consumer-facing standard of the kimkim Climate Action Pilot Programme, delivered in partnership with kimkim, Wilderness Leadership School, ETC Africa and The Eco Travel Boutique.
The programme combines carbon measurement, independent verification and benchmarking to help tourism businesses understand their environmental performance, identify realistic opportunities for improvement and communicate their impact with greater confidence.
The programme currently covers South African tourism properties, with expansion across Southern Africa planned as the model develops.
For more information, visit ETC Africa – Verified Impact.
This article is written by Craig Mitchell, KhakiBush Magazine editor, conservationist, guide, adventurer, photographer and explorer. Craig personally guides safari and adventure expeditions, sharing his passion for Africa's wild places through authentic wildlife encounters, remote landscapes, and unforgettable experiences.
Keywords: tourism carbon footprint Africa, sustainable tourism Africa, ecotourism, African conservation, tourism sustainability, carbon emissions, safari lodges, Verified Impact, climate action, responsible tourism
