Conrad Maldives Ranglai Island restaurant

The Conrad Maldives Rangali Island has been voted the  winner  in the category “Personal Favourite” by the renowned German Spa Magazine, ‘SENSES’ annual wellness awards.

This is the 11th year that the SENSES Wellness awards have been and are co-ordinated by the SENSES editorial staff together with a select panel of experts.  Conrad Maldives Rangali Island competed   against over 350 hotels and resorts. The lush twin-island resort was chosen the “Personal Favourite” for 2009.
General Manager and Island Chief of the Conrad Maldives Rangali Island, Carsten Schieck, collected the esteemed award from famous German TV-Presenter, Alexandra Polzin at a ceremony held at the grand ‘Altes Stadthaus’ in Berlin on Thursday 12 March 2009.
The spa resort which has bungalows overwater offers a range of holistic treatments and spa packages, plus the services of a resident Personal Trainer, Naturopath and Nutritionist, restaurant, reception, hairdressers and retail area. The Over-Water Spa in Conrad Maldives Rangali Island  offers signature couples rituals in glass floor treatment rooms and Serenity Spa Deck with open air Jacuzzi.

Winners SENSES Destinations Award:

• Bali – 2009 SENSES Spa Destination of the World

The winners of the SENSES Wellness Award 2009:

• Category “Best City Resort”: Ritz Carlton Moscow
• Category “Best Country Resort”: Parkhotel Vitznau, Switzerland
• Category “Best Beach Resort”: Kempinski Hotel Barbaros Bay, Bodrum, Turkey
• Category “Best Alpine Spa”: Hotel Arlberg Hospiz, St. Christoph, Austria
• Category “Best Boutique Spa”: The Mandala Hotel, Berlin
• Category “Personal Favourite”: Conrad Maldives at Rangali Island, Maldives

The winners of the special categories for the SENSES Wellness Award 2009

• SENSES Lifetime Award: Emanuel Berger, CEO Victoria Jungfrau Collection
• SENSES Destinations Award: Bali – 2009 SENSES Spa Destination of the World
• SENSES Medical Wellness Award: Dr. Wolf Funfack, Metabolic Balance
• SENSES Visions Award: Shangri-La Hotels & Resorts for its CHI Spa concept
• SENSES Innovations Award: Vita Life

Images of Conrad Maldives Rangali Island

Resorts are seperate islands

The Maldives has taken a policy diversion aimed at increasing contact between visitors and inhabitants of the island chain in the Indian Ocean. Previously tourists are not allowed to stay within in local communities.

The tourism minister of the Maldives speaking to the German weekly newspaper, Die Zeit, the minister, Dr Ahmed Ali Sawad, said there would no longer be a “parallel world” of resort islands kept separate from the islands inhabited by Maldivians.

“We are pleased about every guest who seeks the seclusion of a resort island,” Sawad remarked, adding, “But we also want to invite tourists to visit our communities.”

According to Dr Sawad a first step would be a ferry network linking the some 200 inhabited islands, enabling tourists to “island-hop” and boosting exchanges among the islanders themselves.

The earthtimes.org quoted the minister “Up to now in the Maldives, we have constantly built for tourism and benefited ourselves only secondarily. Now it’s going to be the other way around,”

During early 1980’s the government prohibited tourists staying in local islands stating that it has a negative impact on local communities. The decision to allow mix tourists and local will have positive effect to community.

A resort in Maldives

The Maldives celebrated the “Earth Hour” for the first time, on Saturday night. Earth Hour is a global event organised by the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF). The Earth Hour is held on the last Saturday of March annually, asking households and businesses to turn off their non-essential lights and other electrical appliances for one hour to raise awareness towards the need to take action on climate change.

People of the Maldives  in Malé, the resorts and other islands took part in the celebration by turning off all the electrical equipment that weren’t absolutely necessary between 8:30pm and 9:30pm. According to Haveeru newspaper there was a decrease of a 3MW consumption in the most populous capital island Male’.

According to Minivan News President Mohamed Nasheed has said awareness about climate change has increased over recent years. The Earth Hour celebrations in the Maldives,  began with the president switching off the lights of his residence, Muleeaage, at 8.30pm on Saturday.

Maldives Island

Mark Lynas’s book Six Degrees strongly affects those who read it. It is a powerful but quietly voiced assessment of how the world will change as temperatures rise. The people of the Maldives, only too aware that their low-lying coral atolls are likely to disappear before the end of the century, are particularly interested in climate change and Lynas’s book has been widely read in government circles in the capital Malé.

Last month the Maldives asked him for a plan to make the country “carbon-neutral”. After a few days’ work, he and I sent an outline scheme to the government in time for the president to make an announcement at the London premiere of Franny Armstrong’s The Age of Stupid, a powerful film about climate change.

In our draft plan we showed how energy from wind and the sun could produce enough electricity to cover current needs and provide a surplus for future growth. A power station burning coconut husks will provide backup on those relatively rare occasions when the wind and sun aren’t enough. Batteries will provide short-term storage on remote islands. Petrol can be largely replaced by ethanol made from Brazilian sugar cane.

Ambitiously, we said that the Republic of Maldives could set a target of going carbon-neutral within a decade or so. But we haven’t proposed a way of avoiding the use of aviation fuel. So are we guilty of greenwash, like so many of the companies that brashly proclaim carbon neutrality on their website and in their sustainability reports?

Yes, in one sense we are. More than 500,000 people take long-distance flights to the Maldives, adding over a million tonnes of CO2 to the atmosphere every year. Our plan does not reduce the consumption of aviation fuel by a single litre. By setting out the steps to enable the Maldives to brand itself as a carbon-neutral destination, we could be accused of actually encouraging long-distance holidays. Eager travel agents will seize on the Maldives’ plan and use it to persuade wavering customers that their air travel has no ecological side effects.

Our defence is that the emissions from air travel to the Maldives will be offset by the purchase of European emissions permits. Every European power station, many large factories and other major polluters have been granted rights to emit a certain amount of CO2. If a company wants to emit more than its allowance it has to buy certificates from other polluters who have permits to spare. The Maldives will become part of this scheme.

In effect we are admitting that air travel to the Maldives is a major source of pollution, just as if the country was a German power station or a Dutch cement works. Because the Maldives is a voluntary participant in the European scheme, it will not have any free emissions allowances. The total number of permits in the system will not rise as a result of the new entrant.

The Maldives’ plan to buy allowances covering all the emissions from international flights to and from Malé therefore means that the emissions of other European polluters will have to decrease by an equal amount. This isn’t a perfect solution, but it seems the best way of ensuring a flight to the Maldives doesn’t add a single kilogramme to overall world emissions.

Nevertheless, many people believe that buying emissions permits is a poor compromise. They point out that the European scheme has set lax limits on the total amount of CO2 emitted by the continent’s major carbon polluters. This is one of the reasons why the current price of permits is so low. However, the whole point of our scheme is that it will tighten the market, making emissions just a little bit more costly for all the major polluters across Europe.

Until the aviation industry develops sustainable biofuels, the only possible alternative to offsetting is to restrict the total number of flights to and from the Maldives. This would cripple the tourist industry and reduce the incomes of most of the inhabitants of the islands.

No scheme that places a large part of the burden of climate change mitigation on to the poorer half of the world can be appropriate. Although no one is completely happy with offsetting, even through the European emissions trading scheme, we believe it can be an effective way of helping the Maldives become carbon neutral.

Courtesy:  Chris Goodall, guardian.co.uk

Original article at: http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/cif-green/2009/mar/26/maldives-carbon-neutral-greenwash