04 Mar 2016

From the desert in the United Arab Emirates to the shores of a Maldivian island to an elephant camp in the North of Thailand, Anantara Hotels, Resorts & Spas celebrates 15 years of unforgettable journeys since the luxury hospitality brand’s first resort in Hua Hin opened its doors. Guests and team members enjoyed the festivities in 11 countries around the world, including Chairman and CEO of Minor International, William Heinecke, and CEO of Minor Hotel Group, Dillip Rajakarier who joined in the celebrations in Bangkok, the brand’s home base.

Green Growth 2050, the ‘next-generation’ sustainability solution has released the world’s first cloud-based CSR Project reporting initiative specific to the Travel & Tourism industry that brings together both impact analysis and reporting across the enterprise.

Today’s corporate Travel & Tourism enterprises are looking beyond the legacy Certification systems of yesterday to solutions that support main-stream industry programs including the UN Global Compact, Dow Jones Sustainability Index, Global Reporting Initiative and other enterprise based sustainability drivers.

Shareholders, investors and other stakeholders demand today’s global leaders provide accurate and verifiable information beyond even triple bottom line detail.

An Article from The Guardian by Green Growth 2050 Chairman, Professor Geoff Lipman

The SDGs reframe the Earth summit agreements into a new global blueprint for the 21st century – a “transformational agenda” for sustainable development to 2030 and beyond.

It’s a long journey, with each country, locality and individual coming from a different starting point, with unique capacities and reasons to change. Ultimately we have to get to the same end point by 2050 – the date, where science and politics are converging on livable global temperature stabilisation. With new multi-billion dollar funds, legal frameworks and collaborations to support that change.

2015 will be a year when global attention on green growth will intensify under the pressure of 3 Heads of State Summits to establish Sustainable Development Goals, Resilience Financing, and critically Carbon Targets.

The Paris UNFCCC meeting in December will introduce a reduction system that will become legally enforceable by 2020 and will oblige all industries – including Travel & Tourism to develop adaptation programs. But the other Summits will also increase related environmental and social impact pressures to measure and improve a wide variety of social inclusion, local community engagement, and resource management areas – historically grouped as CSR issues.

Green growth is a subject I’ve been involved in for 40 years in international leadership and academia – and last year, with Vision CSR headed by Wayne McKinnon, an experienced professional in environmental operations we decided to try to create a new management system – GreenGrowth2050. It has been designed to support companies who really want to go beyond traditional tourism environmental certification and build a strong long term CSR platform that is in line with global good practice.

GreenGrowth2050 has been carefully constructed to cover all elements in existing tourism sustainability programs plus key elements from key UN and International agencies dealing with environment and social responsibility for business. It has also taken into account the changes that leading edge companies around the world are making inside organizations such as the World Economic Forum and the World Business Council for Sustainable Development. It’s why we label it as beyond travel – despite its central tourism green growth focus.