Federico Solano described a new scheme called Tour Operators Promoting Sustainability, or TOPS, for both local Latin American tourism companies and those sending customers from the UK and other countries.

After bringing together travel companies that have made a commitment to sustainable practices, the Alliance hopes to launch a group-wide marketing campaign, creating one of the world’s first networks of green-certified operators.

Twelve UK holiday companies already have contracts with the Rainforest Alliance in place, committing them to using accommodation and cruise companies that operate in a sustainable way. These include The Adventure Company, Exodus, Explore, Hands Up Holidays and Imaginative Traveller. Federico said UK companies have been among the most supportive of the Alliance’s work, and that he hopes they will all sign up to the TOPS platform.

I’m looking forward to seeing how the new TOPS project progresses, and hope to see lots more of the Rainforest Alliance on the UK travel trade circuit. Perhaps a UK consumer travel show, featuring only Rainforest Alliance partners, could be something for the not-too-distant future…

I got chance to meet a Rainforest Alliance-certified operator just yesterday. Costa Rican Horizontes Tours, which specialises in nature tours, has been working alongside the Rainforest Alliance for several years. Rodolfo Alvarez explained how the company uses certified hotels as much as possible, and how it has introduced volunteering projects, home-stays and tree-planting options to help its customers interact more with nature and with Costa Rica’s people. I won two nights at a Costa Rican yoga retreat so I hope I may get chance to go and explore the country’s wildlife for myself sometime soon!

When I saw the photo, I thought surely this must be the smallest frog in the world?

Au contraire – it’s only the smallest species discovered in the OLD world .

They’ve found even smaller ones in Brazil and Cuba, though there seems to be some confusion over whether the Brazilian Gold Frog (Brachycephalus didactylus) or Cuba’s Monte Iberia Eleuth (Eleutherodactylus iberia) is the smallest.

Here are pictures of them both, anyhow:

The researchers are out in Borneo searching for the world’s lost amphibians as part of a campaign organized by Conservation International and IUCN’s Amphibians Specialist Group.

It’s worth checking out CI’s Search For the Lost Frogs page if you have a minute….

There’s a special photo group set up on Flickr for you to upload your own frog photos, and I’ve just uploaded a pic I took in Le Perinet rainforest in Madagascar…I’m hoping someone will identify it for me.

I was a guest of the Malaysia Tourist Board, which won Gold for its rainforest-inspired garden, designed by James Wong (off the Grow Your Own Drugs programme on TV).

The garden was really beautiful, with square stone slabs like stepping-stones on a shallow lake, and shiny foliage of different greens, shapes and textures.

I heard a few visitors grumble that there weren’t actually any flowers, but I loved it – much more to my taste than rows of rhodedendrons or pots of pansies.

A soundtrack of bird and animal noises played softly in the background and it was so relaxing I almost fell asleep on the Minister of
Tourism.

Dato Sri Dr Ng Yen Yen, the minister, told me all about the flowers in her own garden, and about the government’s plan to create a Malaysian version of the Royal Horticultural Society, to get more Malaysians involved in and excited by gardening.

I also had an interesting chat with James himself, about how gardeners often tend to want to grow species from far-away places, instead of appreciating what grows in their ‘own back yard’.

“When I was growing up in Malaysia, all I wanted to do was grow English roses and a perfect striped lawn,” he says. “They’d struggle against the climate. It’s only recently that Malaysians are realising there are so many things around them that are more beautiful than any rose. I hope we’ve shown that our normal plants can win gold on the world stage.”

This got me thinking about the impact of flying and shipping plants and trees from one side of the world to the other to make our gardens look pretty.  There’s often talk about ‘food miles’ but what about ‘plant miles’?

My other favourite gardens at the show included the Global Stone Bee-Friendly Garden, which had a giant message reminding visitors of Albert Einstein’s prophecy that ‘when the last bee disappears off the face of the earth, man only has four years to live” (see my earlier feature on the decline of the honey bee).

I also loved Bradstone Biodiversity Garden which had insect-friendly flowers and log-piles, and a stone pavilion with crevices for nesting birds and bamboo canes to house insects.

The Eden Project garden was huge, if a little bonkers, with rows of old washing machine doors. It did well in the competition but I wasn’t sure if buying the biggest plot of the Show might have anything to do with it.

I was also fascinated by the Naturally Norway garden which was promoting the use of kebony instead of tropical timber for decking and pavilions. Kebony is made using the byproducts of sugar-cane production to harden sustainable wood species like pine and maple, and it looked stunning.

I wasn’t convinced by the Daily Telegraph garden, which seemed to have gone for the overgrown, disused railway track look. I didn’t find it particularly, beautiful, relaxing or interesting but I must have missed the point as it was the overall winner for 2010. Shows what I know…..

Its work in tourism ranges from training hotel staff on green technology, to helping them attain certificates of sustainability, to educating tourists on how they can minimise their own impact upon the environment while on holiday.

Its sustainable tourism programme began in Ecuador but it’s really been picking up pace, and has recently signed agreements with the  Guatemala tourist board, and CATA, a tourist board for the whole Central American region.

The Alliance’s Federico Salano tells me he’s seen interest in and take-up of sustainable tourism really surge in the last five years. Europeans are particularly ethically-conscious travellers, he adds.

“You simply cannot make business with European companies if you don’t have a sustainable tourism programme now,” he says. “Now it’s a reality more than a trend.”

There are several UK tour operators who currently work with the Rainforest Alliance, with more big names to come onboard soon. Signing an agreement with the Alliance means the operator commits to ensuring that half of the hotels and other businesses it works with have appropriate green certification.

It sounds like a fantastic programme, but I wonder if they could perhaps set the bar even higher. What’s to stop a tour operator dealing with the most gas-guzzling, tree-felling, water-polluting tourism businesses in the Americas for the other 50% of their business?

One thing’s for sure: the system of green accreditation and certification within the tourism industry needs a proper sort out. There are so many confusing acronyms out there – STCNA, CST, STEP and QTC to name a few – that you can’t see the wood for the trees, if you’ll excuse the pun.

Federico tells me that the Rainforest Alliance is teaming up with the UN and several other bodies to launch the Tourism Sustainability Council or TSC in April next year. It will be the ‘certifier for certifications’, “giving order to the myriad certifications and checklists around the world,” he says.

Great news, but I wish they’d come up with a snappier name!