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A more eco-responsible safari in Africa is possible!

2022-09-25T05:16:38.353Z


Helicopters and 4x4s, infinity pools and isolated lodges that are difficult to supply: safari is by nature a very energy-intensive activity. However, goodwill and new technologies have made it progress by leaps and bounds in recent years. Four reasons for hope.


Overflight by plane or helicopter, gleaming 4X4s surfing for hours in the savannah, private infinity pool, electricity in abundance supplied by generators... The safari in Africa is an activity that in essence consumes a lot of a rare resource and more and more valuable.

According to the International Energy Agency, however, Africa is only responsible for about 3% of global energy-related greenhouse gas emissions and 7% of total emissions (for 18% of world population).

During the recent climate summit in Africa organized by the UN on August 29, the continent showed its willingness to play its full part in the changes underway.

The safari in Africa attracts millions of visitors seduced precisely by a preserved environment.

It is impossible today to ignore the impact of this activity and even more in the most preserved areas of the world.

Like other sectors, travel questions and acts.

Here are some virtuous examples that presage others in the future, inevitably.

Read alsoSporting, historical or gastronomic: four safaris with a little extra soul

The electric 4X4 in its infancy

The 4X4 is indeed an emblematic vehicle of the safari.

These “pick-up” type vehicles are generally customized to become bigger, more comfortable, more resistant and heavier.

They therefore consume large quantities of an expensive fuel in addition to being a polluter.

But there are solutions… The quickest way is not to destroy these vehicles to replace them, but to adapt them.

For this, a technology exists: the "retrofit", which consists of transforming a thermal vehicle (petrol and often diesel) into an electric vehicle.

The precursor French company in this field is Carwatt.

In a few words, they remove the entire engine block from the 4x4 to replace it with second-life batteries.

In Tanzania, the company e-motion Africa has partnered with Carwatt to develop this technology for so-called sedentary vehicles - those that do game drives around lodges as opposed to roving vehicles that travel long distances.

Their autonomy allows them to travel a little over 150km and therefore cover vast spaces… In silence.

Also a precursor, the Grumeti Hills Lodge (at the gates of the Serengeti Park, still in Tanzania) which offers silent and clean safaris to its customers.

If the fauna is not accustomed to the silence of these steel machines and can be surprised (especially the elephants), the safari is all the more exceptional.

Read alsoCap on a confidential Tanzania, in the footsteps of wildlife

The sun instead of generators

The Mara Serena solar station, Kenya.

Serena Hotels / Photo press

An African lodge is by nature isolated from the world, it is even what characterizes it.

The most beautiful bush landscapes cannot be imagined crossed by electric wires.

To do without these pylons, only one solution existed until now: the generator.

An oil-guzzling engine, disturbing the silence with its mechanical din.

This was forgetting the most abundant energy in Africa: the sun.

Thanks to the fall in the price of solar panels and the increase in battery capacity, solar is now becoming the continent's star resource.

In December 2021, it was estimated that 40% of the world's solar potential was in Africa for only 1% of solar panels.

But for ten years, many projects have been launched on the continent: in Morocco, Togo, Senegal,

Many are the lodges which are equipped with the passage.

In Botswana, the British chain Red Carnation has fully equipped its very design Xigera Safari Lodge, in the heart of the Okavango Delta.

Project manager Mike Myers today proudly shows off the solar station set up to power the camp and its rooms.

The batteries are developed with Tesla technology… Is it necessary to specify the South African origins of Elon Musk?

Here, 100% of the electricity consumed is therefore provided by solar energy, from the sewage treatment plant to the boats that navigate the Okavango River and of course all the needs of a luxury lodge in the middle of nowhere.

The key: the most absolute silence.

More accessible (and larger) lodges are not hesitating to migrate to solar electricity either.

Among them, the Mara Serena Lodge (from the Serena chain, owned by the Aga Khan), a lodge with around a hundred rooms in the Masai Mara reserve (Kenya) inaugurated its solar station at the end of 2019.

Its 74 rooms are lit by this technology.

A trial run that foreshadows many others for the leading hotel group in East Africa.

Read alsoWhen to go to Botswana?

Climate, weather… The best time by region for a safari

More water-efficient lodges

Olduvai camp, Ngorongoro, Tanzania.

Tanganyika Expeditions / Photo press

A lodge must have water, lots of water.

Often installed at the edge of a water point (river, lake or water reservoir), the lodges take this fact into account from the creation project.

Except that the seasons when we like to go on safaris are often the driest.

Those where water is the rarest but also the most necessary to wildlife, to that of populations.

Several scandals have erupted in the Kalahari Desert (Botswana).

Lodges boasted of the beauty of their gigantic swimming pools when the starving streams struggled to water the cattle and meet the needs of the bushmen.

The company involved had to make investments to collect and preserve the precious cash.

Today, in Botswana and elsewhere, each lodge has its sewage treatment plant,

allowing to reject more than 95% of the water consumed, clean, in nature.

But also to collect water during good times.

In Tanzania, some lodges, including the Mara River Post in the Serengeti, are setting up an ingenious harvesting system that keeps scarce but plentiful rainwater in giant reservoirs, waiting for months without rain. .

It is also about being able to recycle this water.

In the driest areas - in Namibia, South Africa, northern Kenya - very deep wells are dug to probe the water tables.

This water must then be reprocessed and returned to nature.

In the very arid Madikwe reserve in South Africa,

the African Bush Lodge

 had an equation to solve: how to have a large lawn of 1600m² in a dry environment six months a year without harming the meager water reserves of the park national ?

The lodge has chosen to operate in a quasi-closed circuit.

The water is drawn directly from the land it is used to water.

Thus, it naturally returns to feed the underground source which feeds the various wells.

A circular system made up of irrigation canals makes it possible to reprocess and then reuse almost all the water.

Read alsoIn South Africa, an ultra-confidential lodge in the heart of Zulu country

The premium for local products

The vegetable garden at Bashay Lodge, Tanzania.

Bashay Lodge / Photo press

We greedily evoke polluting private jets but we forget how some lodges, often the most luxurious, have lived in the past in absurd logics.

Fresh petals flown in every day to the edges of the Ngorongoro crater, organic salmon eaten on a plate in the shade of an acacia tree, prawns from Mozambique tasted 6,000 kilometers away.

Food is one of the keys to luxury: a Relais & Châteaux accommodation can only obtain approval if its table meets certain requirements.

However, the terroir, in the bush, is limited… And that is an understatement.

Solutions, again virtuous, are emerging.

Created in the Cradle of Mankind (cradle of humanity), 52 Cradle, not far from Johannesburg, has oriented all its cuisine around harvests from its permaculture vegetable garden.

The Bashay Lodge in Karatu, not far from the Ngorongoro crater in Tanzania, has also created a huge permaculture vegetable garden.

Maintained and developed by the company Tanganyika Expeditions, it supplies fresh (and local) food to many lodges in the region.

Delicacies that have no place there have also been banned.

No more rose petals, unless you are in the great Kenyan lakes that grow them.

No more grilled prawns, exhausted after several thousand kilometers of travel.

No more smoked salmon that has changed hemisphere.

We consume local and that's good!

Source: lefigaro

All news articles on 2022-09-25

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