India is slowly and steadily becoming more aware of the various problems that the environment is battling with currently.
With Mumbai citizens fighting to save the Aarey forest and other measures being taken to make things more environment friendly, we are on a very good path it feels.
And adding into this group is green tourism, specifically green hotels, which are focused on being environmentally sustainable. They have used different ways to improve and add features so that they do not negatively impact the natural environment around them.
Eco-tourism or green tourism is quite a trend these days and is present even in India with more and more hotels making it one of their biggest attention areas.
In fact, I recently came to know about this campaign called ‘green hotels’ where an organisation is focusing on hotels in Himalayan region and helping them to become eco-friendly.
What Are Green Hotels?
The Himalayan region comprises of 7 states namely Jammu & Kashmir, Himachal Pradesh, Uttarakhand, Sikkim, Arunachal Pradesh and West Bengal.
Now, it actually makes sense to focus on this region considering the amount of traffic these states see in terms of tourism.
In fact, last year Shimla residents even asked tourists to not come to the city since the high number of tourists were harming the water consumption.
So it makes sense to have hotels in these areas go ‘green’ which can then be copied by other tourist destinations in India too.
The WFI (WOMENforINDIA) Foundation is actually behind the initiative and their work includes helping hotels to reduce their carbon-footprint by using the 3 R’s which are:
- recycle
- reuse
- reduce
The team is known to train hotel staff in the above practices and how to apply them to their own business. Things like:
- waste management,
- water management,
- not using single-use plastic and alternate sources of packing and serving food,
- use of natural products rather than man-made,
- wet waste management
are some of the things that the campaign is working on helping hotels learn.
Apart from this they also encourage hotels to put small messages for the consumers themselves such as closing the water tap properly, using paper napkins conservatively, not using plastic, etc. They believe that just reminding the guest about such things can go a long way to reinforcing good and eco-friendly practices.
Currently they are working with 3 hotels in the Tirthan river valley of Himachal Pradesh to become more ‘green’.
It is not just these, but even a few bigger hotels are adopting certain measures to be more environmentally conscious and not add to the carbon footprint.
Read More: Selfie Hungry Tourists Are Threatening Meghalaya’s Ancient Living Root Bridges
What Is Green Tourism?
To be honest, it is not that difficult to understand what green tourism is. It is essentially just being a little conscious of how you are travelling and whether it is harming the environment or not.
Steps like:
- Choosing eco-friendly hotels
- Reducing the number of flights or foregoing them altogether
- Instead selecting transportation modes that are more eco-friendly
- Ordering a limited amount of food in restaurants
- Being aware of the amount of plastic and other garbage you use during the trip
Green tourism also talks about how to not add even more pollution or garbage to the place where you are travelling and instead work on reducing it.
It is certainly a good type of tourism for those who do want to travel but don’t want to harm the environment even further.
Image Credits: Google Images
Sources: Hindustan Times, Wikipedia
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