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Your first step toward embracing sustainable business practices entails creating a sustainability policy, implementing it, and communicating it to your staff. Your sustainability policy will define and help you to clearly communicate your organizational goals and objectives as they relate to your environmental, socio-cultural, and economic performance and related impacts.
Keep in mind that the purpose of your sustainability policy is to help guide decision-making, management and the daily operations of your business in a sustainable manner. To help you prepare an effective sustainability policy, consider the following five steps:
Step 1
Begin by determining your business' commitment to achieve environmental, socio-cultural, and economic performance goals and objectives. Then write your sustainability policy in such a way that its clear, concise, and the language and orientation match your existing literature so that it fits into your mainstream business operations. This approach will provide a solid framework for developing an effective management plan for implementing your policy.
Step 2
Determine your company's positive and negative impacts, such as the amount of energy and water consumed by your business, the amount of greenhouse gasses emitted by your business, and the economic benefits you provide to local and indigenous communities.
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Ensure that your policy provides guidance about the specific environmental, socio-cultural, and economic issues and impacts that are important and relevant to your business operations;
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Prioritize your efforts according to your most significant impacts combined with those that can be implemented most cost efficiently and/or will maximize a return on your investment; and
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Establish a framework for your plan of action.
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Step 3
Address your connection to stakeholders. Determine how you're going to cooperate with your employees, clients, other service providers, and local communities:
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Employees: To a large extent, implementing your sustainability policy successfully depends on the active participation of your employees. Your staff must receive the training required to positively contribute to your sustainability goals and objectives. It is essential that you obtain their support of your company's sustainability policy. |
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Clients: Communicating your efforts toward sustainability to clients is a great way to stimulate interest and cooperation. It's also a great selling point! Promoting your related goals and objectives in your marketing materials will encourage your customers to do their part in contributing to these efforts. Stimulating client involvement is also a good way to educate them and raise awareness of the sustainability issues you're trying to address. |
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Service
providers: Many travel providers subcontract services from other companies. Therefore, it is imperative to ensure that these service providers adhere to sustainable standards as well. Find out if they have a sustainability policy, if they are certified by a sustainable tourism program, or if they follow specified standards. Many providers have a corporate responsibility or environmental policy statement that may lay the foundation. If you find that your service providers are not as devoted to sustainability as you'd like, then consider educating them so that they can achieve a higher level of sustainability and meet your requirements. |
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Local
communities: Local communities and their environments are central to many tourism operations, and they should be invited to play an active, collaborative role in your business. Working with one another to enhance economic development that equally benefits your business and the locals should be a regular process by which your organization interacts within its region(s) of operation. It is essential that local communities where you operate feel like your organization is part of their social system. |
Step 4
Your sustainability policy should also focus on continuous improvement. Set fixed objectives and targets, which can be quantified by measuring your impacts, and then create systems to measure your progress. So you know what's working and what isn't.
Third party assessments and customer feedback are also good ways to monitor your progress. You may also seek assistance from a third-party environmental specialist when dealing with your facilities and their impact on the environment.
Step 5
Last but not least, review and update your sustainability policy annually to ensure that it's up-to-date. Eliminate practices that aren't working and develop new ones to address issues that may have come up during the past year. Your sustainability policy should be a living document - something that will evolve along with your business.
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