Taking a Cue from the United Nations

The United States made headlines this week when it did not endorse the United Nations’ latest report warning of the impacts of climate change.

The move occurred at the 2018 United Nations climate change summit, known as the Conference of the Parties (COP), in Katowice, Poland.

The COP has been tasked with assessing efforts by member nations to reduce greenhouse gas emissions – essentially, planning how to better address the threats of climate change.

The reticence of the U.S. came in the wake of our government’s announced intention to withdraw from the Paris climate change agreement, a historic global commitment necessary to fight against and mitigate the effects of climate change. It also follows a recent government report that offered a dire warning about the devastating impact of climate change on the environment and our economy.

Our government may not recognize the United Nations’ report, but I know for sure that many U.S. corporations, including our own, remain fully committed to adopting sustainable business practices in the face of scarcer natural resources, shifting weather patterns, increasing natural disasters, and decades of impact from our reliance on disposables.

For the hospitality industry, we have a responsibility to protect our communities and environments so they can remain vibrant destinations.

At Marriott, we have many efforts underway around the world to do just that.

In Cape Town, South Africa, for example, we built a desalination plant to convert sea water into drinking water for guests at one of our properties after a devastating drought this year threatened the fresh water supply for the city. Thankfully, aggressive efforts by residents and the agricultural sector to reduce consumption, a push by the city to build desalination plants and rainfall have all helped to avert a disaster. Our plant is saving the city about 400,000 liters of water a day.

At 24 Marriott International properties in Thailand, we are actively supporting the local community in their mangrove reforestation efforts since this valuable ecosystem has been decimated over the last four decades. Since 2013, Marriott associates have been working with The International Union for Conservation of Nature to plant more than 60,000 mangrove saplings and engage in marine wildlife restoration. You can see some of them in the photo above.

At a number of our European properties, we have installed solar panels to reduce our carbon footprint. At the Sheraton Mallorca Arabella Golf Hotel in Spain, we installed an absorption chiller machine to produce chilled water for the air conditioning system using hot water produced by energy from the solar panels that cover the roof of the hotel. With this energy-saving technology, the hotel finds that the hotter the day is, the cooler the air conditioning.

Around the world, we find our guests are eager to participate in sustainability efforts with us. In the United States, for example, guests have helped us plant more than 26,000 trees in just the last eight months, and an additional 130,000 trees in Canada in the last few years in collaboration with our nonprofit partners. This is one of many efforts contributing to our multi-year sustainability and social impact platform, Serve 360: Doing Good in Every Direction, which aims to reduce our water usage by occupied room by 15% and carbon intensity by 30% by 2025.

We are making changes in our operations to assist in our sustainability efforts as well. We announced plans this year to remove disposable plastic straws and stirrers from our more than 6,700 hotels around the world, which could eliminate usage of an estimated one billion plastic straws a year. We’re also installing larger, pump-topped bottles in guestroom showers at more than 1,500 hotels in North America, removing more than 35 million small plastic toiletry bottles annually from landfills in support of our 45% waste-to-landfill reduction goal.

We know we can’t do it alone. Our guests and hotel owners are essential partners in our efforts to reduce our environmental impact, as are our relationships within the hospitality and larger travel and tourism industry. I am proud of our collective efforts to address the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals.

As the COP wraps up this week, I want them to know we are watching and listening. With Serve 360 guiding our path, we remain fully committed to doing our part to address our world’s most critical needs, particularly the impact of climate change.

If your company is doing something innovative in this space, please reply to this post. I’d love to hear about it.