more than a million rooms. We have worked with them to design an executive education programme that is tailored to help leaders in the sector embed and assess ESG measures in their businesses. The programme is built on the foundation of discussions with over 40 senior hospitality leaders from around the world. These leaders emphasised that the recent energy price increases and the new International Financial Reporting Standards for sustainability disclosure were both a motivation and an opportunity to make progress on environmental measures. Why focus on ESG? The UN’s Sustainable Development Goals Report 2023 sets the context for the hospitality sector in terms of the challenges it needs to play its part in addressing. According to the report, while sustainability reporting more generally is on the rise, there has been a decrease in reporting on sustainable consumption and in the monitoring of sustainable tourism. The report also states that the world is seriously off-track on its 2030 goal of halving per capita food waste, a target to which the hospitality sector could certainly contribute. For the hospitality sector, sustainable consumption requires more than just behavioural change: unsustainable energy consumption can be built into the very fabric of its buildings, which range from state-of-the art and carbon-neutral, to drafty old historic palaces with protected status that need to deliver luxury levels of comfort. According to the Urban Land Institute, hotels and lodgings are the least energy and water-efficient buildings in commercial use. Research conducted by the EEA during the programme’s development stages highlighted the scale and complexity of the task leaders face in developing a plan to reduce reliance on fossil fuels. During the pandemic many hotels had zero occupancy, yet found they were still maintaining 60 per cent of their usual levels of energy consumption just to prevent issues with moisture and to ensure that their water and other systems remained hygienic. This brought home the lesson that cutting energy consumption would entail much more than washing towels less frequently. The majority of investors in the sector agree that at least half of the measures needed to improve energy performance will require some degree of capital investment. This could mean accessing new forms of green finance and with it the need for leaders to understand a new set of
priorities, measures and controls in order to be able to communicate with confidence with both staff and investors. What the new programme covers The launch of the programme coincides with a shift in international financial regulations to make ESG reporting mandatory, the scale of which has been likened to the introduction of global financial reporting standards after the 1929 Wall Street Crash. The programme will therefore give an overview of current and planned regulation and ESG reporting requirements, with a strong emphasis on climate change, green finance and the hospitality sector’s social impact through its employment practices. A hotel’s staff make or break its success and the sector has to navigate seasonal demand and the
“Embedding ESG is not a one-off project you can learn how to do and then tick off your list”
44 | Ambition | DECEMBER 2023/JANUARY 2024
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