Organize your events in sustainable buildings

Hosting your meeting or event in a sustainable building can not only help to significantly reduce its overall carbon footprint but also result in a healthier, more positive experience for delegates and benefit the wider local community and environment.

However, sourcing sustainable hotels and venues can be challenging, especially if you are responsible for booking and managing multiple events worldwide. So, it’s important to know what information to look out for and the right questions to ask at the point of initial inquiry.

What makes a sustainable building?

?A sustainable building is one that, in its design, construction or operation, reduces negative impacts, and can create positive impacts, for the climate, natural environment and our health. Some of the key features to look out for include:

• Efficient use of resources including energy and water
• Use of renewable energy
• Pollution and waste reduction measures, alongside re-use and recycling systems
• Good indoor environmental air quality
• Use of materials that are non-toxic, ethical and sustainable
• Consideration of the environment in design, construction and operation

If you choose a hotel or venue partner that is prioritizing most, or all of the above, and can provide the data to back it up, you are off to a good start.

At Radisson Hotel Group, we embrace the target to reduce our carbon footprint and water consumption by 30% by 2025 through close cooperation with hotel teams, property owners, design teams, architects and builders. Across the portfolio, the water footprint per square meter was reduced by 23% in 2021 vs 2019, and we achieved a 20% reduction in energy use.

Look for eco-label certified hotels. If a hotel has an eco-label certification, you can trust that its sustainability achievements have been assessed and recognized by a trusted third-party authority.

Radisson Hotel Group partners with global eco-labels, recognized by the Global Sustainable Tourism Council (GSTC), which audits our hotels’ sustainability performance. Currently, 238 hotels – including 63% of our EMEA portfolio – have an eco-label.

We also actively strive to use smart technologies to limit our energy and water use, reduce waste and increase circular models, and are pursuing a renewable energy sourcing strategy that will increase the amount of renewable electricity we produce and purchase

Setting the standard

If you are unsure, or don’t have the resources or specialist knowledge to look at each individual building’s sustainability credentials in detail when sourcing venues, try to find one with an international sustainable building standard awarded by objective and approved bodies.

Recognized standards include:

• ?LEED (the U.S. Green Building Council’s Leadership in Energy & Environmental Design certification) – the most widely used?green building rating system?in the world
• BREEAM – measures and rewards the environmental performance of a building during its construction or renovation
• EDGE – created by the International Finance Corporation (IFC), a member of the World Bank, encourages the construction of resource-efficient buildings by proving the business case for energy and water-saving measures

At RHG, we are prioritizing these sustainable standards for new builds, conversions and retrofitting existing hotels. We have expanded our construction guidelines, by consolidating the best of the LEED, BREEAM, and EDGE sustainable building certifications to define our own Build Planet levels for hotels constructed or renovated based on a series of sustainable conditions.

Recent examples of our commitment to sustainable building include the Radisson RED Hotel Dubai Silicon Oasis , which has been awarded the ultimate LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) Platinum Certification for its environmentally friendly building design, and the new Radisson Collection Hotel, Magdalena Plaza Sevilla , which has been awarded Spain’s first LEED Hospitality Gold level rating.

Our recently open Radisson Collection Hotel, Gran Via Bilbao is another property in our portfolio proudly awarded with a LEED Platinum green building certification, consuming 47% less energy and 40% less water than comparable buildings. It has also achieved the LEED Innovation credit for creating a ‘Walkable Project site’, which consists of incorporating design elements that promote walking, cycling, and other non-motorized transportation in the hotel’s location and its surrounding community.

We also use the EDGE eco-modeling tool to create a business case for sustainable buildings, particularly in emerging markets, through close cooperation with property owners, investors, builders, and architects. This means that as well as our commitment to making our existing hotel portfolio more sustainable, any new additions to the group will have sustainability at their heart.

?If you want to learn more about Radisson Hotel Group’s sustainability initiatives, you can read more?here.