Travel & Tourism Initiative

What is the Travel and Tourism Initiative?

CPSL has collaborated with 100 of the world’s most influential travel and tourism companies to help them respond to the challenges and opportunities of climate change.

Drawing on its experience of managing The Prince of Wales’s Corporate Leaders Group on Climate Change, the ClimateWise Insurance Initiative and the P8 Pensions Initiative, CPSL worked with members of the World Travel and Tourism Council to create a dialogue to increase understanding of the impact of climate change.

Five Key Themes

WTTC members chose to focus on five key themes in sustainability to achieve their vision:

• Accountability and responsibilty;
• Local community sustainable growth and capacity building;
• Educating customers and stakeholders;
• Greening supply chains;
• Innovation, capital investment and infrastructure.

The report Leading the Challenge on Climate Change highlights a commitment to ten action points within these key areas. The first action point sets an aspiration target of 50% reduction of CO2 emissions across the industry by 2035 which they will achieve by learning from others and sharing examples of best practice across the industry that reduce energy use, improve energy efficiency and increase the use of renewable energy. They set an ambitious interim target, in terms of CO2 emission reduction, of 30% by 2020 with an international agreement on global emission reduction, or 25% by 2020 in the absence of such an agreement. Progressive leaders from the industry are now developing strategies to meet these targets and the action points in the report.

Outcome of the Initiative: Leading the Challenge on Climate Change

Through a process of collaboration, CPSL and WTTC members produced the report Leading the Challenge on Climate Change which was launched at an event hosted by HRH The Prince of Wales at Clarence House, attended by some of the most influential companies from global travel and tourism industry.

The initiative allowed the global travel and tourism industry to signal its intent to deliver deep and rapid cuts in greenhouse gas emissions. In the report, WTTC members offer a vision of a low climate risk travel and tourism industry that decouples growth from increased energy use and resulting greenhouse gas emissions. It represents a ‘call to action’ to others in the industry and by setting an example of best practice encourages governments to offer leadership at a critical time during the period leading to the UNFCCC meeting in Copenhagen in December. The report calls for world leaders to take bold steps to reach an international agreement on climate change.