Before I get stuck in, let me get something straight: I am not against third-party sustainability certification and never have been, but it's not a panacea and, for many businesses in our industry doing incredible things in often remote and challenging places, it's not always the most practical (or affordable) option.

I admire and respect certification's champions, and acknowledge the clarion calls that have been ringing out since the Empowering Consumers for the Green Transition Directive was announced. I just feel there is a yawning divide between what is ideal and reality and it's highlighted in the 2026 State of African Tourism, published by Africa Travel Week, that states that fewer than 5% of tourism properties in Africa hold third-party sustainability certification. The other 95% include some of the finest conservation enterprises on the continent. Is telling that 95% to get certified the answer to this problem? 

A consumer law dressed up as an environmental one

It's worth being clear about what the Empowering Consumers for the Green Transition Directive actually is, because the name does a lot of heavy lifting. 

This is consumer protection legislation, drafted in Brussels to stop European shoppers being misled at the point of sale. It regulates claims but says nothing about practice. A lodge that runs entirely on solar, employs half a village and funds an anti-poaching unit out of its margins has no new obligation under this law and neither does the lodge next door that does none of those things. The only behaviour the directive touches is what either of them writes on a website, and what their European sellers can safely repeat.

The truth of the legislation, which becomes effective in September this year, is that rather than leaping to become certified to prove their sustainability claims, the path of least resistance for most will be silence. Strip the word "eco" from the homepage, delete unprovable claims, say nothing, and you're compliant.

The trade already has a name for this entirely rational response: greenhushing, and the probable outcome of Europe's great green reckoning is a continent full of safari camps doing genuinely good conservation and community work who will simply stop talking about it, because talking about it without the right paperwork will have become a legal risk. For a law supposedly serving sustainability, that's a perverse result.

The silver bullet?

Many are touting certification as the obvious solution to the various scenarios the directive throws up. A recognised third-party certification is great to have, but can be onerous and cost money that product owners often feel has better uses, most of them with measurable conservation and community outcomes attached. However, for the international hospitality groups now planting their flags in the safari space, certification is a line item. These are businesses with environmental, social and governance departments three time zones away, and the compliance machinery already humming for their city portfolios simply extends to the safari lodge.

The result is a system that can be seen to reward the ability to deal with paperwork and pay the fees rather than actual impact. That ability often sits with big foreign-owned brands, so the small African operator doing the real work ends up losing shelf space to the company with the better filing system.Yes, that's a bit of a simplification, but it's still a hard truth for many on the ground who have considered certification, but just can't face it or fund it right now.

No seat at the table

There's a further sting in how this law operates, and it deserves more attention than it's getting. The legal liability of the directive sits with the EU-based seller, the tour operator or DMC marketing to European consumers. African properties carry the cost of compliance without even having standing under the legislation and are basically being told to get audited by proxy, at their own expense, to protect someone else's regulator from someone else's consumer.

Many of us have seen this film before: rules written in Brussels, compliance costs borne in Africa, benefits accruing to European risk managers. Whatever the drafters intended, the directive will be read across much of this continent as one more instance of Europe exporting its regulatory burden southward and calling it virtue. That perception matters commercially, because resentment is a poor foundation for the supplier relationships this industry runs on.

In fairness, the directive does do something positive in that it makes lying potentially expensive. The European Commission's own research found that 53% of green claims it examined were vague, misleading or unfounded. Exposing greenwashing and levelling that particular field is a good thing, even if it makes nobody more sustainable. Truth in advertising is a worthy cause but it's a different cause from the one this legislation claims to serve.

Africa's own proof

The encouraging news is that the trade is already routing around the certification toll booth. Baotree has launched its own, excellent system of tracking sustainability to prove impact and enable tourism brands to verify on the go. Wetu has built a standard self-assessment that suppliers complete once and share across the industry. Go2Africa's verified sustainability model uses its own GSTC-aligned audits to vouch for properties doing the work while they wait for formal accreditation, or instead of it. And Fair Trade Tourism's certification programme is an African-built, African-priced proof system that's audited independently, recognised by Travalyst, and costs a fraction of some of the alternatives.

These are African solutions to Belgian waffle, designed around African operating realities, and they point to where this should go: verification that measures impact on the ground, priced for the businesses doing the measuring, owned by the industry it serves.

Europe's directive may contribute to tidying up the language of travel marketing for those who rely on that market, but sustainability in African tourism was never a vocabulary problem. Out here it has always been the practical business of operating in vast, remote wilderness areas: land under conservation, access to water, local economies driven by tourism and wildlife kept where wildlife belongs. The operators delivering those things deserve proof systems built to recognise them. What we don't deserve is Europesplaining.