Congratulations to the Gros Morne Institute for Sustainable Tourism for securing federal funding from ACOA and Parks Canada to continue its excellent training and development function within the Atlantic Canada Tourism industry!  Makes celebrating Canada Day tomorrow all the more meaningful!

Hats off to all of those involved as volunteers, educators, suppliers, hosts and most importantly industry participants who have contributed to this success!

From your friends: Nancy, Celes and Todd.

Hey there!  Do you know that TIAC (the Tourism Industry Association of Canada) released a Green your Business Toolkit for Tour Operators? It is a 107 page document, free to download at your leisure.  If you haven’t taken advantage of this, you should! Sustainability is everyone’s business.

Check it out!

Orchard Garden Hotel in San Francisco has some ideas on becoming a Green Hotel and working in Green Hospitality.

What does it take to go green? Questioning today’s practices and spending time finding better solutions.

As tourism operators, we often are not equipped with the tools that help us to understand how sustainable our businesses are, pr how to measure sustainability and where to look for shining examples of sustainability.

I have a really great suggestions for you, if you would like to be a leader and position your company as a leader in sustainability.  Dave Butler, Director of Sustainability at Canadian Mountain Holidays has just released their most recent report on corporate sustainability, in their 2009-2010 overview and report entitled Moving Towards Sustainability.  Using Global Reporting Indicators (GRI’s), they summarize their vision and how they are measuring their progress using GRI’s.  Companies such as Apple, Coca Cola and Unilever are using these standards.  However, very few tourism companies appear to be using them.

I would like to invite you to go to their website Stewardship at Canadian Mountain Holidays and take a deep breath before plunging into exploring a very simple and succinct summary of CMH’s bold vision - to be the leading sustainable tourism company in North America. Their commitment to tourism transparency is evident.  You will find their vision, their recent sustainability reports (available for download), and a summary of their Second Nature program. Download either their Overview or the complete report for 2009 – 2010.

Hats off to you Dave and the entire team at CMH!  Canada leads the way through such innovations in engaging sustainability as a core component of tourism.

The Business Case for Sustainability – What’s in it for you?

I had the opportunity to meet Bob Willard, author of several books including most recently The Sustainability Champions Guidebook (How to Transform Your Company), The Next Sustainability Wave, and The Sustainability Advantage.

Bob’s presentation was straight-forward.  If you can get an opportunity to see his presentation, do so.  It is well worth it.  I went twice, to both of his presentations, because the information was so compactly presented.

I interviewed Bob today after the presentation, because I was inspired by his presentation, and interested in his perspectives about sustainability and tourism.  Grab a coffee, or a juice and put your feet up.  This guy has some really neat ideas.  Check out his website Sustainability Advantage. In particular, see the 90 second video introduction from Bob personally.  Well done!

Interview with Bob:

Download the interview

Bob has helped me to articulate  a framework that helps me to bridge my passion for tourism with the business case for sustainability.  I hope that this interview will help you to shift your business towards sustainability.  The planet needs you to do it.  Climate change needs us to act in more innovative ways.  And, wouldn’t it be great to be able to do it in ways that actually increase your profits.

Sharing

What are some suggestions that you have about improvements in your tourism business that have led you forward on the pathway to sustainability?   I would be really interested in hearing your suggestions or examples, so that we can help our entire tourism industry to begin taking the small steps toward sustainability.

Travel and tourism will be tremendously affected by the outcomes of the Copenhagen Climate negotiations, as well as by forthcoming cap and trade legislation that will be passed both in the US and subsequently in Canada.  Not IF, but WHEN.  I think that it behooves all of us to start building in a smart, small-steps approach to sustainability into our annual business plan for our tourism companies.  What do you think?

The New Climate Deal - A Pocket Guide, from WWF

Brilliant – a simple, easy to read (I mean easy to read) guide for anyone to clearly understand the Climate and Economic Crisis. Download this simple to read POCKET GUIDE to the new climate deal that over 190 countries in the world will participate in is the new “bible for planetary health”.

Except that this is one of the most important tools to quickly read and understand that 2009 needs to be remembered as the year the world found an answer to climate change, the year it found the political will to meet the challenge, and found hope and opportunity in doing so.

This pocket guide provides you with:

• Key data
• Easy to read graphs
• The Copenhagen people
• The science in a nutshell
• Why it is possible to keep the temperature below 2ºC increase
• A brief guide to the new deal
• Taking responsibility for carbon reduction targets for industrialized nations
• Technology solutions and action programs
• Power grids, financing, and carbon markets (easy to understand)
• Saving our forests and why this is so important
• Going carbon neutral

Why is this pocket guide important for tourism operators to have, to read, and be knowledgeable about?

So that our businesses and operational plans for the forthcoming years, our approaches to integrating carbon friendly transportation, and our approach to becoming carbon neutral becomes part of how we, as Canadian operators, contribute to sustainable tourism.

It is vitally important that we are leaders in sustainable tourism. It is part of why Canada is perceived to Brand #2 in the world – a clean environment, a place with good clean water, and an economy and political context in which we are “perceived to be” leaders in sustainability within the modern world.

Finally, the UN Climate Conference takes place Dec. 7 – 18. We need to be informed about the issues. This pocket guide takes us a long step towards understanding it in a simple and effective way.

What a world we live in…where the planet is in a climate crisis, or as I saw expressed recently, a “climate crunch” (akin to a credit crunch).  Technology is advancing at the speed of the train I am traveling on to Vienna, Austria; millions of Chinese students will graduate this year without a job to go to; McKinsey and Co have released a new report called Pathway to a Low Carbon Economy.  To help with the discussion and debate about the technical and economic feasibility of different carbon emission reduction levels, McKinsey & Co and ten leading companies and organizations from across the world have developed a global greenhouse gas abatement data base.  The report is not an assessment of policies or regulatory choices; rather, its purpose is to provide an objective and uniform set of data that serves as a starting point for corporate leaders, academics, and policy makers when discussion how best to achieve emission reductions.

The World Travel & Tourism Council has just released its report Leading the Challenge on Climate Change (through tourism).   The Tourism Industry Association of Canada just announced its new Canadian sustainable tourism advisory committee.

I will be attending, along with hundreds of other Canadian and American climate change presenters (including my good friend and fellow Climate Change presenter Todd Lucier), the North American Climate Change Summit with Al Gore in May in Nashville, Tennessee.  This time, though, its not just about gaining more knowledge about climate change.  Now, it’s time for launching a world-wide campaign to aggressively advocate and facilitate government-led policies and legislative changes that will chart new directions for businesses and communities.

My awareness is that there is a convergence of intention and more important, commitment from businesses all over the world to do what is necessary to save our planet through changing the way we live and do things.  My friend and colleague Stan Cook, a Newfoundland kayak operator, and now chair of the Tourism Industry Association of Canada has a great commitment to sustainability.  I think, in his new capacity of chair of the Tourism Industry Association of Canada, that he will be bringing a razor-sharp focus to how we, as tourism industry folks, need to integrate sustainability into every aspect of our tourism operations.

I have realized that the next few years of my life will be dedicated to communicating and educating to the tourism industry and to community leaders in Canada about the effects of climate change.  I will do what I can to engage them thoughtfully, respectfully, and actively in facilitating them to take the necessary steps to change strategies and tactics to reduce carbon emissions in their businesses, communities, farms, and personal life-styles.  Triple bottom line accounting (Profitability, economic accountability and social responsibility) will be the norm, not the exception.

My children are concerned about what the planet will look like in 10 years, 20 years, 40 years – and, what they will be left with as a legacy to live their lives.  As I look out at the river beside the train east of Innsbruck (near Kufstein), and realize that this evening I will be south of the Danube in Vienna, I am aware that European countries have been cleaning up their industries, their rivers, their city air (Linz in Austria is a great example), and they are doing this because they know it needs to be done.  And yet, in Canada and in my home province of Manitoba, we continue to drive in large vehicles that emit extensive greenhouse gases and are very fuel-inefficient; we consume water at prodigious rates;  and we pollute our waters (lakes, rivers, groundwater) with little commitment to changing our actions to avoid long-term consequences at the local level, or on the planet.

As a tourism industry leader and award-winning Manitoba learning adventure company, I am aware of the tender balance between travellers’ values and motivations and the need to operate a company that puts food on the table for our family.  Meaning that our tourism business must demonstrate leadership in sustainability in practice because reduced carbon emissions are critical, and because travellers are becoming educated about the need to travel in a more responsible way.  They expect us to be leaders in providing travel in a sustainable manner.

In my post on the Tourism Cafe some days ago, I shared some insights and thoughts from a young Canadian Pentathlon athlete who I believe has some good advice for all of us.  Take a few moments to read her thoughts.

I have come to a point of realizing that we need to integrate Experiential Tourism, Sustainable Tourism, and smart online marketing to help educate our guests, and to share the stories of success that we are having in Canada with “greening our tourism businesses”.  These are not separate tasks…they are integrated, and I believe that tourism operators, DMO’s, PMO’s, and TIAC all have responsibilities here to connect and integrate these core aspects of travel that exemplifies the best of “the Canadian experience”.