ESG and Hospitality: ¶An Evolving Sustainability Context
This article discusses the importance of understanding the relationship between sustainability and hospitality in the current global context, which is characterized by a convergence of global risks linked to climate change and biodiversity collapse. The hospitality industry operates in a volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous environment, which makes it difficult to devise a resilient path that considers environmental, social and governance...
French poet Paul Valery once stated that ‘everything simple is false, everything complex is unusable’[1].
Today’s global context is anything but simple. We are exposed to a convergence of global risks linked to climate change and biodiversity collapse posing a threat to the fabric of society. We are also faced with turbulent socio-economic situations and unstable geopolitics. The convergence of global systemic risks is coined as the ‘global polycrisis’[2]. The hospitality industry operates in a volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous environment. Since complex is unusable, and knowing that hospitality performs best under stable conditions[3], what is the best strategy to devise today to lay the foundation to a resilient path considering the Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) risks?
The Hotel Yearbook 2023 - Annual Edition
As we have embarked on 2023, it is evident that the hotel industry has made a robust recovery from the
pandemic.
Occupancy and pricing have returned to their pre-pandemic levels. However, the future of our
industry is contingent
on how nimble the hospitality sector can be in adapting to ongoing innovation, changing market
conditions, evolving
consumer preferences, new staffing challenges, and sustainability realities. These uncertainties are
the new normal
in an unpredictable world.