The travel industry is going to have to measure the social and environmental costs and benefits of its activities if it is to have a viable future.
Malcolm Preston, chief executive of PricewaterhouseCooper’s sustainability and climate change practice, said many leading firms are already doing this work like Puma, Unilever and Walmart.
He said all of these firms have come to accept that operating in a sustainable way was actually good for their bottom line and they have set specific and ambitious targets.
Preston said business executives are making “hard-nosed business decisions” that will fundamentally change the way they will do business in the future.
He told delegates since it worked with Puma on a world first environmental profit-and-loss account all the brand’s main competitors have been in touch to ask how they can do it.