One of my daughter’s favourite games at the moment is to pretend she is four years old. She isn’t, she’s three, but she feels that her birthday in May is too far away, so we have lots of pretend celebrations.
As we grow older, birthdays bring a healthy opportunity to reflect on life and think about where we are going. It is similar with World Responsible Tourism Day.
Celebrating the impressive achievements of some companies within our industry is important, but it is also useful to pause and consider the extent of progress.
Two brief examples in the tourism industry illustrate some of the outstanding work being done.
In southern Africa, Wilderness Safaris has worked to bring white and black rhinos back from near-extinction in Botswana. Sea turtles are monitored and protected, indigenous species of bird have been reintroduced and anti-poaching programmes have been established.
In a very different environment, Scandic Hotels has used a basic environmental interest among its Scandinavian workforce to create a common ethic of environmental concern in all aspects of its business.
As a result, Scandic has 16,000 rooms in which 97% of the materials used can be recycled and more than 100 of its 135 hotels are certified by the Nordic Swan eco-label.
The group aims to be carbon neutral by 2025. These are intentions matched by measurable outcomes.
Outside tourism, Tesco has spent more than £86 million to date on low-carbon technology and understanding how to encourage consumers to be more environmentally aware in their purchases.
Barclays has implemented a five-year programme investing in energy efficiency and made its UK operations carbon neutral for 2006 at a cost of £1.7 million.
Global resource company BHP Billiton aims to contribute 1% of its pre-tax profits a year to social responsibility efforts.
This means that in 2007/08 the company donated $141 million to finding ways of eradicating malaria in South Africa, Swaziland and Mozambique. Pharmaceutical company Merck has donated up to 120 million tablets, costing $1.50 each, to cure river blindness, which has helped more than 30 million people.
What is considered to be ‘responsible’ is not fixed. It changes because of actions such as those of the companies above,
which seem determined to move beyond good governance and claims to be “doing what we always do, but now doing it better”.
Corporate responsibility is moving into a terrain where companies have to justify their command of scarce resources. This will place tourism in competition with other industries and make comparisons with the responsibility claims of the tourism industry more important.
The difficult economic environment will provide an opportunity for some to argue that now is not the time to extend the responsibility agenda.
Yet responsibilities are just the flip-side of rights.
Unless the tourism industry plans to relinquish some of its rights to enjoy the world’s beautiful resources, it cannot reduce its responsibilities to preserve these.
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