What is Eco Dive?

Details

Written by Eco Dive

Why Eco?

Eco Dive is a Gold Coast Dive Centre that not only promotes but also supports ocean conservation. We will do this in 3 ways: Education, Action and Financial.

Education

PADI offers a range of courses aimed at improving divers knowledge of the marine world, ocean conservation, raising awareness and improving a divers skills to minimise their impact on marine ecosystems. The courses include:

• AWARE – Coral Reef Conservation
• AWARE – Fish Identification
• AWARE Shark Conservation Distinctive Specialty
• CoralWatch Coral Health Chart Distinctive Specialty
• Peak Performance Buoyancy
• Project AWARE Specialty
• Sea Turtle Awareness Distinctive Specialty
• Underwater Naturalist

Action

Eco Dive will participate in activities specifically designed to enhance direct awareness of marine conservation. Activities like Clean Up Australia go a long way towards raising general awareness of the damage rubbish can do to the environment. Likewise, we will run a Dive for Debris event every 6 months to make a positive impact on our waterways and remove huge amounts of fishing line and tackle.

We have also developed an action plan for our operation that reduces our carbon footprint. This action plan covers simple activities such as separating rubbish, through to using renewable energy. Our vehicles will be serviced regularly to keep them operating efficiently, and every 12 months we will complete an energy audit to determine our carbon footprint. This will be determined to purchase offsets in a government approved offset scheme (sorry, I don't really have faith that all the money collected in carbon tax will be used for environmental projects).

Financial

In addition to purchasing carbon offset credits, Eco Dive will, naturally, join PADI's 100% AWARE program, where we donate $10 from every recreational certification to Project AWARE, and in return the students are given an AWARE version of their certification card. When we run Dive Against Debris events, we will charge volunteers $20 to cover the costs of Air Fills, and 100% will be donated to a marine conservation group chosen by the participants.

Because we want to promote PADI's environmental courses, every month we will run one of them at a heavily discounted price. Knowledge is power, and the more people know about the underwater world, the more they will be driven to take action.