Home Energy Management Cornell Hotel Sustainability Benchmarking Index Keeps Getting Bigger

Cornell Hotel Sustainability Benchmarking Index Keeps Getting Bigger

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Glenn Hasek

Just how well is the global hotel industry, especially the U.S. hotel industry, doing in reducing its environmental impact as a whole? Thanks to the folks at Greenview, the Cornell Center for Hospitality Research, and companies like Hilton, Hyatt, Marriott and others who provide access to their data, we have a pretty good idea—and the news is not too bad.

This is the seventh time the parties involved have produced the Cornell Hotel Sustainability Benchmarking (CHSB) Index and the report shows that carbon emissions per square meter of hotels around the world has decreased by 10 percent since 2015.

The report was authored by Eric Ricaurte, CEO of Greenview, and Rehmaashini Jagarajan, a Manager at Greenview. According to the authors, while the bulk of the data still come from hotels in the United States, the study also recorded a greater international participation since the last report, with 55 nations and 20 international hotel chains represented. More than 18,000 hotels contributed information regarding their energy and water usage, as well as their greenhouse gas emissions. Hotels were benchmarked regarding energy, water, and carbon performance against competitive sets in the same geography, segment, and climate zone.

Clearly, there is no other report like it in our industry and I encourage you to give it a good look and participate next year if your company or hotel did not participate this year. The Index is open to all hotels and hotel companies of all sizes.

Best Improvement in United Kingdom

According to the report, the greatest reduction in carbon emissions per square meter was across hotels in the United Kingdom, in which carbon footprint reduced on average 23.4 percent between 2015 and 2018. Hotels in India, Canada and the United States experienced a decrease of 14.4 percent, 13.6 percent, and 12.1 percent, respectively. Hotels in China showed slightly less improvement at a 7.4 percent average reduction in carbon footprint.

Of the countries contained within the index, in 2018, hotels in Switzerland had the lowest carbon intensity (20.4 kg CO2emissions per square meter), whereas those in South Africa had the highest (209.78 kg CO2 emissions per square meter). At city level, Montreal’s hotels are the best performing (24.63 kg CO2 emissions per square meter) while in Abu Dhabi the average hotel emits 251.55 kg CO2 emissions per square meter, the highest in the index.

The data show that the greatest improvement in carbon intensity reduction is seen in limited service hotels (a reduction of 16.39 percent between 2015 and 2018) compared to full-service hotels (6.19 percent improvement).

In a press release about the Index, Greenview’s Ricaurte said, “We are seeing increasing pressure from the investor community for companies to better understand their climate risks and impacts, and put in place steps to reduce their carbon emissions. The fact that the 2020 report has an increase of 25 percent in hotels participating compared to 2019 shows how the industry is increasingly engaged in understanding its environmental performance. CHSB allows individual hotels, or those with significant portfolios, to benchmark their performance against peers and gain a deeper understanding of the opportunities to improve. In doing so CHSB also provides a common yardstick for measuring and reporting the carbon, energy, and water performance of hotels. In a fragmented and regionally diverse industry such as hospitality, this is key to driving towards a common ambition to increase efficiencies and reduce negative impact.”

Linda Canina, the Dr. Michael Dang Director of the Center for Hospitality Research at Cornell University’s School of Hotel Administration said, “The Center for Hospitality Research is delighted to publish the CHSB index to assist hotels in meeting their sustainability goals. I encourage all hotel companies from around the world to participate in CHSB, so that the dataset can continue to grow and improve for the benefit of the industry, consumers, and most importantly, our environment.”

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