Price Of Sustainability

Hotel overhauls, changes in food sources to add to cost of greener stays

- Sarah Stanley

The year 2030 will be an important one for sustainability.

The Singapore Green Plan has multiple targets charted for that year and, as one of the countries supporting the United Nations' 2030 Sustainable Development Agenda, the Republic also has until then to realise its 17 goals.

UN's agenda includes targets such as ensuring universal access to clean and affordable energy, and halving global food waste at retail and consumer levels.

In 2023, the UN said the world is "drastically off track" for its climate change targets. It is 2025 and experts say not much has improved.

With five years left to achieve the multitudinous green goals, the travel and tourism industry has been galvanised to take more urgent action to save the planet.

According to the World Travel & Tourism Council (WTTC), travel and tourism accounted for around 8.1 per cent of global greenhouse gas emissions in 2023.

The industry's emissions may seem small, but the impact on the environment is formidable.

In 2019, every dollar spent on tourism was found to generate 1.02kg of carbon emissions, about 30 per cent more than the global economic average, based on a December 2024 study published in the peer-reviewed science journal Nature.

Hotels - which play a key role in travel and operate round the clock - are among the highest consumers of energy and water per square foot of land.

Research by the World Sustainable Hospitality Alliance (WSHA) shows that to prevent emissions from rising alongside industry growth, hotels must reduce their carbon emissions by 66 per cent by 2030 and 90 per cent by 2050.

As a result, the hotel industry is investing more financial resources in green solutions - costs that have been trickling down to travellers.