Sitting in beautiful Rocky Harbour NL, at the Edge of the Wedge Experiential Travel for the Gros Morne Institute for Sustainable Tourism training we had a great discussion with 24 tourism industry professionals on this topic. Following a quick brainstorm, here is what our group came up with! And what is great, people spoke about how they could contribute – take personal ownership of one or more actions, opportunities or educational activity.
Suggestions
- Make tighter regulations and make it mandatory for funding for new projects
- Ensure new tourism developments adhere to new standards that factor in sustainability
- Encourage more companies to conduct environmental assessments to understand their business efficiencies and support them to make positive change
- Encourage people attending meetings, workshops, and conferences to carpool
- Eliminate bottled water from meetings and your organization
- Encourage industry to use green facilities for meetings, suggest how to manage with low paper, no paper meetings (you actually can save money!)
- Discover excellent examples of companies who are doing a great job (e.g. Olivier Soapery, NB) and promote them, put links to government websites along with educational links. Celebrate who is doing great things in your community
- Have a contest to find who ‘is green … sustainable’ and write a quick story up on their innovation in the past year, then post to a website for all to share, then Twitter the link so everyone who is following the topic has the potential access the information
- Work with motor coach companies to ensure when they visit your attraction/hotel they are required to adhere to a no idling policy – build it right into the contract!
- Work within government to help reduce the red tape and outrageous amount of paper work to help small businesses
- Collaborate with businesses or organizations to create a central list of credible resources so business can find it quickly, easily (e.g. links to the BC Climate Secretariat, TIAC Sustainability, etc. )
- Educate and lead by example
- Create policies that are consistently implemented and enforced between government departments and monitor to ensure accountability for positive change
- Help employees find individual ways to be more sustainable that they can take responsibility for (e.g. Royal Roads University School of Tourism and Hospitality Management support staff at have spent a year moving the academic resources from large paper binders to memory sticks, linking to articles vs printing them out and ensuring copy rights are adhered to)
- Look for collective social initiatives such as Earth Day or Earth Hour and educate people within government about why they need to support it – walk the talk with their own behaviour — in support of what the general population is doing!
- Use some of the stimulus funding that ONLY supports projects with a defined contribution to sustainability, give higher funding levels to those who innovate
- The government needs to practice what it preaches, and Canada needs to begin to preach a better message that is more aligned with the rest of the world, we are not leading edge where. Despite individual business efforts to improve and drive their businesses, the support from government isn’t always there in ways that help small tourism businesses
- No more printer in every office! Walk to get your paper and promote healthy living at the same time.
- Add a signature block to your emails that has a sustainability message such as “ Please consider the environment before printing this email.”
- Write a communiqué that builds advocacy for carbon friendly travel in Canada. Then via the web, sign up everyone who shares the core values and be prepared to share it with key audiences, politicians
- Make sustainable practice an element in our activities in tourism
- Get the government on board for investing in repurposing heritage buildings, finding and funding initiatives that will support improving heritage, and looking to new standards and guidelines that respect preservation but allow for modern sustainability
- Appreciate that developing a sustainable consumer mindset is a social behavioural change – just like seat belts, it will take generations but every action helps, every citizen, business, community can contribute.
- Find cool partnerships between government to support business – such as New Brunswick Tourism and Parks with Efficiency New Brunswick to support companies in training and education who are developing experiential, sustainable tourism products
- At the New Brunswick Tourism and Parks new product development launch on 29 April 2009, have a 50/50 draw to pay for the carbon off-sets of the keynote speakers Nancy Arsenault from Royal Roads University and Michellen McKenzie from the Canadian Tourism Commission, then contribute to a meaningful project.
- Give carbon off-sets to conference speakers
- Instead of giving gifts, give carbon off-sets to speakers.
- Encourage tourism operators to given benefits to travel to be climate conscious “2 for 1 climate conscious travel package from Toronto”
And that was in 20 minutes — imagine what we can do when we put our heads togehter. We need ideas that are strategic, operational, tactical and to enable we need political and organization support, education and funding. Then celebrate success!!!
