Here at Flamingo Land Resort we take part in the David Bellamy Conservation Award Scheme, one of the longest running green tourism awards in the UK, and have just been assessed once again.

Flamingo Land Resort is regularly assessed by the scheme’s team of local wildlife experts. The assessors look at the steps holiday parks are taking to manage their land as a haven for wildlife, reduce their use of energy, water and other resources. They investigate our reduce, reuse, recycle waste protocols while also assessing how parks support their local communities. The assessment is not easy – this year I took part in the assessment to really get to grips with the award. Together with the Director of Conservation, Dr. Andy Marshall, our assessor spent a full day here at Flamingo Land Resort, and didn’t even have time to try out any of the rides!

The assessment looked at what we had done in the past year to impact native wildlife and to build on our previous awards. Last year we received gold so we were hoping to add to Britain’s gold medal tally! I was pretty confident in our appraisal as I had faith in our CIRCLE team who are dedicated to increasing the biodiversity on site. And with our new sustainability action plan in development I was hoping that our efforts would shine through. The jewel in our crown surely had to be that we managed to count more native wildlife species on site in our 24 hour BioBlitz than last year, and our 2000 new trees planted next to our giraffe house. If the Queen Jubilee Oak was not going to get us gold, nothing would!

After a few weeks of waiting for the confirmation we finally got the award in the post… gold was awarded again! This award shows our commitment to environmental excellence. For 2012/2013 we are going to try to take extra steps to get the public involved with our green efforts, so keep an eye on our facebook page for special events that you can go green!