1.🚁 Heli view: How Africa’s most nature-dependent sector is going green

Winners build coalitions. The continent’s environment contains the largest carbon sinks on the planet, making it central to limiting climate change. 

• While safeguarding those rich & diverse landscapes is essential to tourism. 

Win-win: Climate activism and the hospitality sector are natural allies in Africa. Both rely on nature’s bounty. Yet until recently their shared interest was far from obvious. 

• Activists griped about emissions from long-distance air travel. 

• And tour operators feared association with political causes. 

What changed: Two things shifted mindsets. Climate action has become more urgent, making activists less choosy. 

• And consumers, namely tourists, are increasingly embracing the climate cause.

• Far from shying away, operators have now started to market sustainability.

Prime example: Private sector giants such as andBeyond, a South Africa-based tourism company with $556 million in annual revenues, are skewing green. 

• andBeyond’s prides itself on “caring for the land, its wildlife and the people”. 

• It recently secured a multi-decade concession on Kenya’s Suyian Conservancy together with a conservation charity.

Public sector: Governments are slowly following where the private sector is heading.

• Kruger National Park, one of the most popular conservation areas in Africa with over a million visitors a year, runs its own solar farm. 

• By next year, it expects to have removed all its camps from the national grid. 

• It also runs a science campus focused on biodiversity and erects green buildings from locally recycled materials.

Funding change: Some African governments have also started to offer financial incentives for green tourism. 

• South Africa gives grants to small hospitality businesses covering up to 90% of the cost of installing renewable energy and water solutions. 

The impact: Just how powerful a lever for climate action the hospitality sector is has been underestimated. 

• More than 66 million visitors came to Africa last year, contributing 8% to GDP. 

• Some regions are seeing annual growth rates above 30% in tourism.

• It’s the largest foreign currency earner in many countries (e.g. Kenya).

• It is also a major employer (6% of all jobs), with lots more potential for green roles. 

Innovation surge: Among the biggest hurdles to change – beyond a lack of awareness – is the availability of solutions suited to a green hospitality sector. 

• Tourism is lagging behind other African sectors in creating new business models and sustainable supply chains. But that’s changing. 

New investment: Purple Elephant is a venture funder focused on African green hospitality.

• CEO Ben Peterson targets software solutions that support greening the sector. 

• He says he aims to address the impact of climate change through technology. 

• Based in Nairobi, his team designs and scales regenerative tourism start-ups. 

Hospitality 2.0: One of the newly invested startups is Kijani, an ecommerce platform that provides eco-friendly supplies to the tourism industry. 

• The business recently opened a warehouse in Kenya for deliveries to hotels and lodges that seek green efficiencies and reduced transport emissions.

The future: Where the sector may be heading in the long term can be seen in Morocco. 

• It attracts 13 million tourists a year (a fifth of Africa’s total) despite or perhaps in part because it is the only African nation to meet its international climate goals (SDG 13).

2. Cheat sheet: Six steps to a green hotel

The 200-room Azembay property near Casablanca proclaims complete sustainability. The owners, Kew Green Group, seek net zero emission across their portfolio by 2040.