Environmental Policy
Environmental Action Plan
- Version
- 3.2
- Adopted
- October 2026
- Next review
- October 2027
Our approach
Looking After Our Own Footprint
We spend our days protecting reefs and mangroves, so we owe it to them to keep a close eye on our own impact.
Our Environmental Action Plan covers how we run our campus and how we carry out our conservation, research, training and volunteer work: the resources we use, the waste and wastewater we produce, our effect on habitats, and the environmental claims we publish. It applies to staff, volunteers and interns alike, and we pass the relevant parts on to the suppliers and contractors who work for us.
Throughout, we keep three things apart: what we already do, what we’re working on, and what we’ve actually measured. Where a figure is an estimate, we say so. This third edition builds on the plan first drawn up at a staff and volunteer workshop in November 2017, led by environmental consultant Amy Slack, and updated in 2018.
Everyday practice
What We Already Do
Vegetarian by Default
Our kitchen serves vegetarian meals as standard. Chicken or pork is cooked on Saturdays for those who ask for it, plus the odd holiday dinner. We never serve beef or lamb, and the kitchen doesn’t serve seafood. The only seafood volunteers are likely to eat with us is at a community event once or twice a year.
Leftovers go to our pigs and chickens, so no food ends up in the bin. Our hens keep us in eggs for most of the year, we grow bananas, passion fruit, mangoes, pineapples and mulberries, and most of what we buy is local produce. More about our kitchen and food.
In 2020 we launched Veggioke, a vegetarian recipe site promoted through Google Ad Grants, which has since reached more than a million visitors.
Building and Buying
Bamboo grown on our own land supplies building material. When we buy, we favour durable, repairable equipment and keep things in use for as long as they’re safe. We choose refills, returnable packaging and sensibly sized bulk buys over excess stock.
Our liability and sign-up forms are completed online, which saves a stack of paper for every new arrival.
Waste on Base
We sort our campus waste, and roughly half of it by weight is recycled. The rest goes to a sanitary landfill. That figure is an estimate, and confirming exactly where each waste stream ends up is part of this year’s plan.
Clean-Ups, Counted Separately
Our Pro Ocean team has collected more than 427,000 kg of marine litter since 2020, and about 40% of it by weight is recycled. That’s litter removed from beaches, mangroves and reefs, not waste we produce, so we keep it out of our own waste figures. Read more about combating ocean plastics.
Water and Wastewater
In 2021 we drilled our own well to 61 metres to make our water supply more reliable. We protect it from contamination, fix leaks quickly and avoid needless use, and we’re working out the best way to measure what we use.
Sewage goes to septic tanks. Greywater from our kitchen and bathrooms waters the bananas and passion fruit we grow for our own table, and any excess soaks into low ground where we grow bamboo for building. This year we’re mapping and reviewing the whole system.
On the Reef
Our diving follows Green Fins guidance, in training and on every dive. Underwater, we don’t touch the reef, apart from removing litter and ghost nets, and any research sampling follows our permits and approved methods.
We dive mostly from shore, so we rarely need a boat or an anchor. Every volunteer is issued a full-length wetsuit for every dive, which also means less sunscreen in the water.
Travel
Getting Here
Flying here has a real carbon cost, and we won’t pretend otherwise.
We estimate the flights of our 2026 volunteers at around 360 tonnes of CO2e, or around 610 tonnes including radiative forcing, the extra warming from emissions released high in the atmosphere. That’s about 2.1 tonnes per volunteer before radiative forcing, or about 0.27 tonnes for each week of a typical eight-week stay.
What your stay supports is real too. Since 2015, our volunteers have funded and planted around 31,000 mangroves. We estimate about half have taken root, and not one of those trees would be there without them. Most of the planting happened before 2020, and good sites have become hard to find, so we’re now looking for abandoned fish ponds to turn back into mangrove forest.
On base, you’ll eat mostly vegetarian, mostly local food. Below, we set the numbers side by side, so you can judge for yourself.
If you’re flying here
- Stay longer if you can. Your flights cause the same emissions however long you stay, so a longer stay means far less carbon per week of conservation work.
- Fly economy. On long-haul flights, a premium economy seat carries about 1.6 times the emissions of an economy seat, and business about 2.9 times.
- Fly direct where possible. Extra legs usually add distance and another take-off.
Volunteer carbon, 2026
Weighing It Up
Here’s how one year of volunteer flights compares with what our surviving mangroves take up in a year, and with the change in what you eat while you’re here. All of these are estimates. We show them side by side, and never subtract one from another.
Flights
We used the UK Government’s 2026 conversion factors (DEFRA), great-circle distances plus 8% for routing, and typical connections from each volunteer’s home country. Premium seats count for more, so we adjusted for the cabin mix our volunteers reported in October 2026: 81% economy, 13% premium economy and 6% business. That added about 19% to an economy-only estimate.
The results rest on country averages rather than actual tickets, and a handful of business-class travellers moves them noticeably. We’ll keep asking new volunteers how they flew, to sharpen the estimate.
Mangroves
Our records show about 30,000 mangroves planted between 2015 and 2020, and 1,300 more since 2024. We estimate around half have survived, roughly 15,650 trees, though that hasn’t yet been confirmed by a field count.
Using published equations for Southeast Asian mangroves, we estimate the surviving 2015 to 2020 trees now hold about 270 to 1,400 tonnes of CO2, with a central estimate of about 700. Averaged over their life so far, that’s about 30 to 165 tonnes a year, equal to roughly 8% to 45% of one year’s volunteer flights before radiative forcing, or a little over a fifth on the central estimate.
Food
Most meals here are vegetarian, whatever you eat at home. Of the 32 volunteers we asked in October 2026, a quarter were already vegan or vegetarian, while just over a quarter ate meat at most or all of their meals.
Based on a large UK diet study (Scarborough et al., 2014), eating with us cuts an average volunteer’s dietary emissions by about 1.3 to 1.5 kg CO2e a day, or roughly 70 to 85 kg over an eight-week stay. That’s about 3% to 4% of their flights. It’s a rough figure: our Saturday meat option and meals out on days off mean it slightly overstates the saving, while it probably understates it for our heaviest meat eaters.
Energy on Base
Most volunteers share fan-cooled dorms of four to six, with a plug socket each and televisions shared in communal areas, so your personal electricity use is likely lower here than at home.
We won’t call that a saving yet. Your home usually keeps running while you’re away, and our grid leans heavily on coal, so a kilowatt-hour here can cause more emissions than one at home. Once we’ve measured electricity per person-day, we’ll publish a proper comparison.
Why We Don’t Call It an Offset
We don’t subtract mangrove carbon or diet savings from flight emissions. Survival rates and trunk sizes are still to be measured, we haven’t yet mapped the planted area or set a baseline for what would have grown there anyway, and stored carbon can be lost to typhoons, cutting or disease. Timing matters too: a flight’s emissions happen at once, while trees take up carbon over decades. So we report both side by side, and tackle flights at their source by encouraging longer stays.
Methods, sources and limitations are set out in full in Section 5 of our Environmental Action Plan (PDF).
Year one
What We’re Working On
The first year of this plan is about getting reliable baselines and finishing the improvements we can. We’ll set percentage-reduction targets once we know our starting point and how best to measure it.
Late 2026 or early 2027
Solar Power
Our grid electricity still leans heavily on coal, though part of it is geothermal. We’re installing 67 solar panels on one of our roofs, 33.5 kWp in total. Much of our heaviest demand, from dive compressors to office air conditioning, falls in daylight, so most of what the panels produce should be used on site. We’ll then apply for net metering, so any surplus goes back to the grid, and publish the measured reduction once the system is running.
By January 2027
Baselines and Reviews
We’ll gather our electricity, fuel and water records, along with occupancy, so that later comparisons are fair. We’ll confirm where every waste stream goes, including anything a recycler turns away. We’ll map our drainage, septic tanks and greywater areas, review how we handle waste from our pigs and chickens, and fix anything that needs it. And we’ll compare meal numbers with the food going to our animals, to keep surplus low.
By April 2027
Travel Reporting
Our first estimate of volunteer flights is above. Next, we’ll add staff travel, document our routes, method and reporting boundary, and ask every new volunteer how they flew and how they eat at home, so both estimates get sharper.
October 2027
First Public Update
Our first annual report on this plan, along with a review of the plan itself. Until then, we check progress every six months, and any urgent pollution problem we find is dealt with straight away.
Each annual update will cover energy, water, wastewater, waste destinations, food, travel and progress on this plan, with the period, method and limits of every figure, and measures such as electricity per occupied person-day so that years can be compared fairly. Clean-up litter and mangrove carbon will always be reported separately from our own footprint, and this page and the downloadable plan will be updated together.
Each action has a permanent staff lead, and our management oversees the plan as a whole. Volunteers often lend a hand, but responsibility stays with our staff.
Further reading
Related Pages
Our Kitchen and Food
What we cook on base, and why it’s mostly vegetarian.
Mangroves
Where our volunteers have planted mangroves, and what comes next.
Combating Ocean Plastics
Our Pro Ocean team and the litter they collect.
Ethical Volunteering
The principles behind our volunteer programme.
Expenditures
Where our income goes, and what it pays for.
Veggioke
Our vegetarian recipe site, with easy meat-free versions of Filipino favourites.
Questions About Our Footprint?
If you’d like more detail on anything in this plan, or have ideas that could help us improve it, we’d love to hear from you.