the Green Hotel Initiative

About the Green Hotel Initiative

According to the Travel Industry Association of America, US business travel expenditures totaled $185 billion in 2000, with $37 billion spent on accommodation alone. The Green Hotel Initiative (GHI) is a Ceres program designed to increase and demonstrate market demand for environmentally responsible hotel services. Despite the promotion of environmentally sound practices by environmental advocates, even within the industry, hotels currently feel little demand for these services.

The leaders behind the GHI - including representatives from business, the hotel industry, labor, academia, and environmental advocacy organizations - have identified the tremendous potential for the combined buying power of corporate and organizational purchasers of hotel services. The ongoing challenge for the GHI is to determine how to leverage that buying power to increase the supply of green hotel services - for both businesses (as institutional purchasers) and individual travelers.

In this respect, the GHI's work is focused on:

• Educating purchasers of hotel services, particularly large buyers such as corporate meeting planners, about what they can ask from lodging providers,
• Creating vehicles for these purchasers to express their demand for these services, and
• Providing mechanisms for hotels to communicate their environmental performance.

Tools

Best Practice Survey, an easy-to-use list of criteria that helps a purchaser to assess a hotel's environmental commitment and performance. Using the survey enables decision-makers to choose hotels that meet all business needs, including their own environmental preferences. This tool also helps make the hotel industry aware of business demand for "green" accommodations.

GHI Guest Request Card , a tool to help individual travelers request environmentally responsible services upon checking-in to a hotel, as well as the opportunity to provide feedback when checking-out. This tool also sends an important message to hotels that there is a customer demand for environmentally friendly services. To order cards for your organization please use the GHI Guest Request Card order form.

GHI Community, offers a free online list serve that enables participants to become part of a virtual community of green hotel advocates. In the past, the breadth of organizations and sectors that have contributed to the efforts of the GHI community have included Swissôtel, Saunders Hotel Group, Meeting Strategies Worldwide, Fairmont Hotel and Resorts, Eco-Logical Solutions, Green Seal, Inc., Cornell University's School of Hotel Administration, Nike, General Motors, Ford Motor Company, PA Consulting Group, Meeting Strategies World Wide, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Co-op America, Ocean's Blue Foundation, and Conservation International.

Current State of GHI

The GHI is an important industry program within the Ceres network. We work with hotels and the GHI network and also respond to requests for our Best Practice Survey and Guest Request Cards - tools that continue to advance our work.

 

Chinese scientists set to study Mekong River

Sixteen Chinese scientists will start a 20-day exploratory mission of the Mekong River this week, aiming to learn about the state

of the river’s current ecosystem, how it evolved, and the extent of its environmental impacts. According to a Xinhua report the

team includes experts from the Chinese Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Geographic Sciences and Natural Resources

Research, the Institute of Hydrobiology, and Kunming Institute of Botany. The team’s tour will start from Xishuangbanna in

Yunnan province and gradually move downstream.

 

East Antarctica is losing ice

 

The East Antarctic ice sheet has been losing mass for the last three years, according to an analysis of satellite data. The BBC reported that scientists have been surprised by the findings, as the giant East Antarctic sheet, unlike the west, has been relatively stable until now. The satellite has previously shown that the smaller West Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets are losing mass. The complete melting of the East Antarctic sheet would raise sea levels by over 50 meters.

 

eco facts

 

• Recycling conserves our valuable natural resources.
• Recycling saves energy.
• Recycling can save money and create jobs.
• Paper products use up at least 35 percent of the world's annual commercial wood harvest.
• Recycling one aluminum can saves enough energy to run a TV for three hours.
• The average house uses one acre of trees to build.
• The United States is the number one trash producing company in the world at 1,609 pounds per person, per year.
• If everyone on earth consumed as many resources as Americans do, we would need four planet earths to provide enough resources. In other words, 5% of the world's population (the United States), consumes 25% of the world's resources.
• Paper products make up the largest part of our trash (approx. 40%).
• If all of our newspaper was recycled, we could save about 250,000,000 trees each year!
• Americans throw away enough aluminum every three months to rebuild our entire commercial air fleet.
• Plastic bags and other plastic thrown into the ocean kill as many as 1,000,000 sea creatures every year.

 

world temps to rise!

 

Research finds that global emissions have

risen 29% since 2000, and that world temperatures are on

course to rise by up to 6ºC.

Amphibians in crisis

A third of all species of amphibian are threatened with extinction; nearly half are in decline,

and they are the most threatened of all the vertebrate groups. If allowed to continue, the

projected losses would constitute the largest mass extinction since the disappearance of the

dinosaurs, the BBC reports.