The Verified Impact project
Building a better way to understand tourism’s climate impact.
Verified Impact is a working pilot exploring how tourism properties can measure their operational greenhouse-gas emissions, understand the evidence behind those numbers, compare performance responsibly and track change over time.
It began with a simple challenge: how can the African tourism industry address its climate impact in a way that is credible, practical and relevant to the realities of operating across the continent?
Why this project exists
Tourism needs better evidence, not simpler claims.
Tourism creates livelihoods, supports conservation economies and gives wild and culturally important places tangible value. It also creates greenhouse-gas emissions through energy, transport, food, waste, water systems and the supply chains that keep properties operating.
Both realities matter.
Yet many tourism businesses still lack the data, internal capacity and meaningful reference points needed to understand their operational footprint. A carbon number on its own is rarely enough. Properties also need to know whether the evidence is reliable, how their performance compares and whether it is improving.
Measurement
Many properties do not yet have a complete or consistent operational emissions baseline.
Context
A remote safari lodge, an urban guesthouse and a coastal resort operate under very different conditions. Comparison without context can mislead.
Action
Reporting only becomes valuable when it helps properties strengthen evidence, identify priorities and make better operational decisions.
The purpose is not to make travel look impact-free. It is to make tourism’s impact more visible, more understandable and more manageable.
The catalyst
The kimkim Climate Action Pilot.
Verified Impact grew from the kimkim Climate Action Pilot Programme: a collaborative initiative created to help participating African tourism properties build practical carbon-footprint knowledge, establish operational baselines and strengthen their ability to respond to climate change.
kimkim provided the catalytic funding that allowed the project to move from an idea into a live programme working with real tourism businesses.
The pilot brought together complementary partners:
kimkim
Programme funder and catalyst
Provided the funding and initial platform that made the pilot possible.
Read about the original pilot
Wilderness Leadership School
Implementation and oversight
Brought its conservation leadership, programme oversight and connection to the wider relationship between tourism, people and wild places.
ETC Africa
Technical partner
Developed and applied the greenhouse-gas assessment process, delivered training, reviewed property evidence and built the underlying benchmark dataset.
Eco-Travel Boutique
Property and market partner
Supported participating properties and helped connect verified operational information with more responsible tourism choices.
What we are building
More than a collection of carbon footprints.
The pilot is creating a shared body of operational evidence from different tourism settings. That evidence helps us test which measures are meaningful, where data gaps occur and how results can be communicated without oversimplifying them.
A practical assessment method
A repeatable way to establish reporting boundaries, calculate emissions and express operational intensity per bed night.
An evidence framework
A way to distinguish between strong primary records, calculated evidence, reasonable assumptions and uncertain estimates.
A responsible benchmark
A developing comparison dataset that helps place a property’s result in context without reducing very different operations to a simplistic league table.
A public language
A clearer way to communicate Data Quality, Benchmark and Trajectory to property teams, travellers and the travel trade.
Learning through participation.
- 01
Onboard
Understand each property’s operating model, location, reporting boundary and available information.
- 02
Build the baseline
Collect operational activity data and calculate the property’s first greenhouse-gas inventory.
- 03
Review the evidence
Record the quality of the supporting information, identify gaps and distinguish measured values from assumptions.
- 04
Compare and interpret
Place the result within the developing benchmark while considering the property’s operating context.
- 05
Repeat and improve
Strengthen future data, implement operational changes and compare the next sufficiently similar reporting period with the baseline.
The pilot is deliberately iterative. The method improves as properties participate, questions emerge and stronger evidence becomes available.
Early lessons
The questions are as valuable as the answers.
The pilot is already showing where African tourism businesses need stronger tools, clearer definitions and more useful reference points. These are areas of active learning rather than final conclusions.
Data is uneven
Properties may have excellent records for electricity and fuel but limited information for waste, deliveries or outsourced transport.
Context changes the number
Grid supply, generator dependence, remoteness, transport distance, occupancy and the services offered all influence operational emissions.
One number is not enough
Carbon intensity is more useful when accompanied by evidence quality, benchmark context and direction of travel.
Baselines matter
For many properties, the first meaningful achievement is establishing a credible starting point against which improvement can be measured.
Capacity matters
Lasting improvement requires property teams to understand the information and participate in its collection—not simply receive a technical report.
Comparison requires care
A benchmark should help explain performance and identify questions. It should not be used to declare one very different tourism business inherently “good” and another “bad.”
The wider opportunity
Developed from African tourism realities.
African tourism includes remote camps, conservation lodges, beach properties, city hotels, community enterprises and small owner-managed businesses. These operations face different infrastructure, supply-chain, energy and data challenges from one another—and often from the settings in which mainstream reporting systems were developed.
Verified Impact is exploring how recognised greenhouse-gas accounting principles can be translated into a framework that is practical for these varied operating environments.
The ambition is not to create a weaker local version of international practice. It is to create a credible and usable application of that practice, informed by evidence from African tourism businesses themselves.
Locally relevant
Reflecting the infrastructure and operating conditions properties actually face.
Technically grounded
Using recognised greenhouse-gas accounting principles and consistent calculation rules.
Open to development
Designed to improve as the benchmark grows and the industry contributes more evidence.
What it is
- A working pilot and developing assessment framework.
- A growing operational emissions dataset.
- A way to strengthen evidence and internal capacity.
- A tool for comparison, learning and improvement.
- A collaboration between tourism, conservation and technical partners.
What it is not
- A claim that tourism has no climate impact.
- A carbon-neutrality or net-zero programme.
- A simplistic ranking of tourism properties.
- A replacement for property-specific action.
- A finished universal standard.
- A certification or star-grading system.
The next phase
From individual baselines to shared industry knowledge.
As more assessments and comparable reporting years are completed, the project can build a clearer picture of where tourism’s operational emissions occur, which interventions are effective and where businesses need better tools or support.
Expand the evidence base
Bring more tourism businesses, property types and African operating contexts into the dataset.
Strengthen comparability
Refine benchmark groupings and eligibility rules as the available data grows.
Track change over time
Move from baseline assessments toward credible year-on-year trajectories.
Share what we learn
Turn emerging patterns into practical guidance, training and useful industry conversations.
The long-term value of the project will not be measured by the number of badges displayed. It will be measured by better evidence, better decisions and demonstrable improvement.
Help shape what comes next
This is something the industry can build together.
Verified Impact welcomes tourism properties, technical contributors, travel partners and funders who want to help develop a more credible and practical response to tourism’s climate impact.
Measured. Benchmarked. Improving.