Here To Stay: Sustainability In The Travel And Leisure Sector | PwC Reports
In March 2007 United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon told a UN conference in New York “We have to change the way we live, and rethink the way we travel”.
When you start seeing cars marketed on the basis of lower CO2 emissions rather than performance or design features, you know a seismic shift in public attitudes is taking place. We talked at some length about climate change in the 2006 edition of Hospitality Directions1, but in the two years since then we have reached and passed a major tipping point.
When you start seeing cars marketed on the basis of lower CO2 emissions rather than performance or design features, you know a seismic shift in public attitudes is taking place. We talked at some length about climate change in the 2006 edition of Hospitality Directions1, but in the two years since then we have reached and passed a major tipping point. The science of global warming has finally been validated, and governments, businesses and individuals are coming to terms with the scale and speed of the consequences. Last year’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report predicted a rise in global temperatures by 2100 that is likely to be between 1.8 and 4oC, and could be as much as 6.4o. Even at 2o we will see a shrinking of the Greenland ice cap, a significant rise in sea levels, more extreme weather and droughts, and a massive negative impact on plant and animal life. And all of this has enormous economic implications: Nicholas Stern’s 2006 report for the UK government equated a temperature rise of 5-6 oC with a 5-10 per cent reduction in global GDP.
New costs – and new opportunities
In the wake of these reports, and international media events like An Inconvenient Truth and Live Earth, people around the world are starting to make changes in their personal lifestyles, and this is translating into growing pressure on both governments and businesses to take real action. Issues such as carbon reduction, recycling, and water and energy use, have assumed far greater prominence, not only for the media and consumers, but – crucially – for the financial markets as well. It’s not just Socially Responsible Investment funds who are analysing companies’ performance in these areas now, but mainstream institutional investors.
At the same time the implications of climate change are rising to the top of the list of issues preoccupying the typical CEO. In PricewaterhouseCoopers’ (PwC) latest Annual Global CEO survey2, published in January 2008, more than a third of the respondents said they were investing significant resources to address the risks and opportunities arising from climate change, and this rose to 56 per cent for CEOs running businesses turning
- Hospitality Directions, March 2006 issue 13, “Corporate Responsibility in the Hospitality sector: pain or gain?”
- PricewaterhouseCoopers 11th Annual Global CEO Survey, January 2008, “Compete & Collaborate”