Destination, ecosystem, and community health are climbing the corporate agenda — and threatening another core pillar of climate work.
At Skift Global Forum last week, Accor CEO Sebastien Bazin said that every time his company opens a hotel, they ask how much is being taken away from the community versus how much employment and economic development they are giving back. “If it’s negative, just don’t open a hotel,” he said.
Ho Ren Yung of the Banyan Group echoed this sentiment and told the crowd to think about what is being given back versus what’s just being taken away. Banyan thinks about this as its “contribution”, and Ho made the case for nature as a capex line item rather than an externality.
Destination-level work is inherently local, raising questions around how it can scale to the level of the largest hotel and tourism groups. No one I spoke with at Climate Week NYC had an answer to that, though Prince Harry, Duke of Sussex and founder of Travalyst, who spoke with Skift editor-in-chief Sarah Kopit at SGF, suggested an additional set of KPIs including “destination lifetime value.”
Associations have long released frameworks to try to get the industry to consider destination and community health in business decisions, but it’s fair to say actually doing so is still fringe. The Global Sustainable Tourism Council released the second iteration of its GSTC Destination Criteria back in 2019; UN Tourism developed a global standard to measure the sustainability of tourism in 2024 and has an ESG framework for businesses; and the long-running Global Destination Sustainability Index helps destinations benchmark across these metrics.
While active dialogue on destination, ecosystem, and community health is well overdue, it seems to have overtaken the decarbonization conversation. Barely anyone in the rooms I was in talked about emissions reductions — which must still happen in parallel. Tourism was responsible for 8.8% of global greenhouse gas emissions in 2019, with those emissions having grown at double the rate of the global economy, according to a 2024 research paper.
Scientists have predicted an overshoot, where temperatures exceed the Paris Agreement’s goal of 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming and force some level of climate adaptation. The idea is that temperatures peak then settle at a lower level, but that won’t happen if pollution-spewing industries continue to, well, spew emissions. And protecting nature without addressing one of the root causes of its degradation — climate change — means that the industry will always be taking one step forward and two steps back.
🧵News from the week you may have missed given the flurry of events:
An avalanche hit a Nepal base camp where trekkers and staff were preparing for an expedition, killing at least four people with others missing. It comes weeks after a glacier collapse led to fatal flooding at the Nepal-Tibet border, just as trekking season gets underway.
Spain’s emergency responders are tackling another wildfire. This time, it's near Igualeja in Malaga province. People have been told to stay indoors and avoid travel.
Indonesia is also dealing with wildfires. In Borneo, they are tearing through habitats of the critically endangered orangutan.
The UN passed its first declaration on sea level rise, affirming that borders will not change even for disappearing islands.
The agenda for COP31 is shaping up to focus on AI and energy, rather than climate resilience and adaptation. The Antalya Pledge on Artificial Intelligence and the AI for Clean Technologies Initiative were announced during Climate Week NYC.
Trump attacked the IMO's shipping Net-Zero Framework at the UN General Assembly, again. Members will vote on its adoption on Dec 4, 2026.
El Niño and the extreme heat it brings could be responsible for 451,000 additional deaths worldwide in the first nine months of the weather pattern to February 2027, according to a report from the University of Chicago’s Climate Impact Lab.
Airbnb is working with the American Farmland Trust in its latest community program. The pair have launched a ‘Farm to Stay’ Grant Program, where farmers and ranchers can nab up to $10,000 for agritourism.
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