Zoos Victoria’s senior manager of environmental sustainability, Kiam Yoong, is passionate about a world in harmony with the natural environment. Key areas he works in include the development of environmental sustainability policies and strategies, climate change mitigation, alternative energy sources and carbon sinks, net zero emissions, carbon accounting, and zero waste to landfill strategy and implementation.
Yoong believes in a collective and collaborative approach to sustainability. He achieves this by presenting in conferences and seminars, supporting training and student projects with various universities, collaborating with other zoos, and developing guiding papers for the World Association of Zoos and Aquariums (WAZA).
He joined greenloop 22, blooloop’s sustainability in visitor attractions conference, to discuss Zoos Victoria becoming the first zoo group in the world to become carbon neutral back in 2013. He also spoke about other key projects, such as green power, water recycling, zero waste to landfill, offsetting and ESG procurement scorecards.
Yoong noted that one of the most important sustainability projects is staff education. For this reason, Zoos Victoria has implemented an online internal qualification for staff for competency and awareness, called the Online Wisdom & Learning System (OWLS).
He said the group’s environmental management system is “everybody’s responsibility”. “So it’s about bringing staff as well to that journey,” Yoong added. “And I think this is really important because in all organizations, it’s not just the sustainability managers or whatever doing the job. It’s about everybody being skilled up to understand what their role is and understand what the impacts are right when they’re doing their work in terms of impacts on the environment, how they can actually manage their work more sustainably.”
greenloop features sustainability leaders working for some of the world’s top attractions, from Merlin Entertainments and the Eden Project to Disney and the Smithsonian. The virtual conference focuses on how zoos and aquariums, museums, theme parks and other attractions are becoming more sustainable.