Travel that leaves a lighter footprint and lasting good
We’re looking to partner with tourism property owners who want their presence to genuinely strengthens the landscapes and communities around them.
If tourism at your property protects wild places, supports people, your community and leaves your destination better than it would have been without you - we want to work with you.
Verified Impact is a structured, year-long programme designed to help you understand, strengthen, and clearly demonstrate the positive role your property plays. Through carbon footprint assessments, peer benchmarking, training, and expert support, we work alongside you to measure what matters and improve where it counts.
Carbon sits at the centre of this approach. It gives us a shared, objective way to understand impact, ensuring sustainability claims are grounded in evidence and that positive contributions are real, measurable, and credible.
If you believe your property creates genuine positive impact and you’re ready to prove it - join us.
Programme Partners
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KimKim
Programme Funder
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Wilderness Leadership School
Project Oversight
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ETC Africa
Technical Partner / Project Manager
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Eco-Travel Boutique
Commercial Partner
About The KimKim Climate Action Pilot Programme
The KimKim Climate Action Pilot Programme is a partnership between KimKim, ETC Africa, the Wilderness Leadership School, and Eco Travel Boutique - bringing together travel innovation, carbon expertise, and over 60 years of conservation leadership. Together, we're implementing the KimKim Climate Action Pilot Program, designed to help tourism play a more constructive role in addressing climate change.
This project grew out of a shared concern across the tourism sector: the climate conversation around travel has become dominated by guilt, simplification, and blame - particularly focused on long-haul flights - while overlooking the very real positive role tourism plays in protecting wild places, carbon sinks, and sustaining conservation economies.
The 25 participating properties are being chosen because they are well-known, frequently booked by KimKim travellers, and share a genuine appetite to understand impacts and improve over time. This programme is grounded in trusted relationships and collaborative learning, not audits or rankings.
This programme is not about selling formal carbon offsets, imposing a "sin tax" on travel, or suggesting that climate change can be solved by planting a few trees. It does not claim that emissions can simply be cancelled out.
Instead, the focus is on helping international travellers and tourism operators better understand the positive impact that responsible travel already creates, alongside the responsibility to reduce negative impacts where possible. In South Africa, vast areas of intact landscapes, biodiversity, and functioning carbon sinks exist precisely because tourism creates value for keeping land wild. Without tourism, many of these areas would face severe pressure from alternative land uses with far higher environmental and social costs.
Within this context, carbon footprinting is used as the most practical and widely accepted way of measuring environmental impact - not because carbon is the only thing that matters, but because it gives us a common, quantifiable language for improvement. Nature-based activities associated with the programme are intended to help travellers and lodges leave something positive behind as a contribution to place, community, and stewardship - rather than just to claim carbon neutrality.
The aim is to replace guilt with understanding and defensiveness with transparency, while supporting real, measurable progress.
“The conversation shouldn’t be whether we should travel or whether long haul flights are bad ….. it’s whether our travel makes places we visit more resilient, more valued, more protected.”— Duncan Pritchard - ETC Africa
Lighter footprint. Stronger place. Lasting impact.
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