A new membership which is available to everyone!
Green Fins digital membership is an explosion of 20 years of marine tourism sustainability experience backed by a world-first digital platform to meet the growing industry demand for Green Fins.
Highlights
Interested? Sign up to be a Digital Member!
Why create a new type of membership?
Demand for Green Fins membership has grown substantially in the past decade. What started in 2004 as a small project in Phuket, Thailand, is now a globally recognised initiative spanning three continents. 14 countries have implemented the Green Fins initiative and over 700 marine tourism operators have pledged to follow the Green Fins Code of Conduct.
For a country to become ‘active’, Reef-World staff must first coordinate a series of country visits to liaise with governments, NGOs and marine tourism businesses. Once agreements are made and Green Fins is established, Reef-World staff then host an intensive week of training for a local team of experienced divers, government officials and NGO employees to become Green Fins assessors. These assessors will then recruit, assess and support dive and snorkel operators to become Green Fins Certified Members. After this training programme, the new location becomes self-sufficient and continues to run Green Fins as part of their annual government activities to promote marine conservation and sustainable tourism.
Green Fins implementation proves time and time again to be successful in reducing marine tourism impact on coral reef ecosystems. However, it is also quite time-consuming! And unfortunately, time is not something we have a lot of if we want to protect and conserve the world’s coral reefs. A shocking 95% of global coral reefs are currently under threat from human activity, ranging from global threats such as climate change to localised threats, including those from diving and snorkelling activities.
There is a huge demand for Green Fins from operations outside the areas accessed by the Green Fins assessor teams. While all the Green Fins materials are freely available on the Green Fins website, we knew we needed to provide another type of membership in the meantime that can be accessed by all marine tourism businesses, no matter the location. And just like that, the Green Fins digital membership was born!
The structure of digital membership
Much of the digital membership structure will be similar to that of certified membership. A marine tourism business must show interest in improving their environmental practices and get in touch with us to sign up for membership. They will then go through a process of learning how to be more sustainable, receive support to identify top priorities and apply proven solutions to their business and receive exciting membership benefits for an entire year, before going through the process all over again.
There are also some differences too, such as:
Throughout the year, Digital Members can improve their environmental Green Fins score by engaging with the exclusive Hub features:-
Key information
Dive, snorkel and liveaboard operations who sign up to be Digital Members will benefit from the following:
Digital membership allows Reef-World to invite the entire marine tourism industry to the Green Fins network for the first time. If you have any queries about these changes to the initiative, please contact us at info@greenfins.net, and we’ll be happy to help.
