Sustainable Tourism Efforts

For the past few years, our team has been assessing resorts and chalets on Tioman Island to encourage more environmentally friendly operations. These assessments follow the ASEAN Green Hotel Standard and guidelines from Malaysia’s Ministry of Tourism and Culture, focusing on sustainable tourism criteria such as efficient waste management, energy efficiency, biodiversity conservation, and local community support. This past quarter, our assessments resulted in 13 resorts in Tioman successfully meeting the Green Hotel criteria.

We’ve also been assessing dive centres on the island through our Green Fins programme – an initiative by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) that promotes environmentally responsible diving. Green Fins members commit to following a 15-point Code of Conduct aimed at reducing the negative impact of diving on marine ecosystems. In the second quarter of this year, we visited several long-standing and new dive shops for assessments, including B & J Diving Centre, Blue Heaven Divers, Tioman Scubadive & Lodge, and Maori—all of which are part of the Green Fins network in Tioman.

A dive centre that successfully completed the Green Fins assessment

Keeping Our Reefs Safe

In this second quarter alone, members of the TMCG, along with boat and dive operators, the local community and Department of Fisheries (DoF) have successfully removed 1,800kg of ghost nets that were found tangled on several reef locations. Ghost nets are essentially torn or damaged fishing nets that have been abandoned by fishermen but can entangle marine life such as fish or turtles, leading to death.  

The TMCG members and local villagers were also hard at work to monitor and remove large populations of Crown-of-Thorns starfish from the three areas around Tioman. In the last three months, 1,000 of these coral predators were culled through injection of vinegar solution. These COTs feed on coral polyps, causing coral death and algae overgrowth on the dead reefs.

Culling of COTs using vinegar solution

Activities with Partners and Sponsors

Our team on Tioman received visits from two of our sponsors and supporters, SBM Offshore and KPMG Malaysia. They spent a few days on Tioman and participated in several activities:

1. KPMG Malaysia:

• Participated in reef rehabilitation activities
• Removed 80 COTS
• Collected 424kf of waste from a beach clean-up in Teluk Kador

2. SBM Offshore:

• Planted 200 coral fragments and produced coral pots (reef rehabilitation structure) by cleaning and crushing glass bottles, as part of the reef rehabilitation programme
• Collected 354.5kg of waste from a beach clean-up in Teluk Genting
• Learnt how recyclables are collected and separated at Rumah Hijau in Kampung Air Batang

SBM Offshore staff preparing glass bottles for the rehabilitation structure