BEIJING—With a key focus on sustainable destinations, infrastructure, over tourism and water management, EarthCheck, a leading business advisory group for travel and tourism, hosted its signature event, the Inner Circle Forum at Marco Polo Parkside in Beijing. The Forum, now in its seventh year, is an exclusive gathering of global travel and tourism thought leaders who collaborate and investigate sustainability challenges facing the tourism industry.
Keynote speaker and internationally renowned Dr. Raj Rajan, Ecolab’s Vice President of Research, Development and Engineering and Global Sustainability Technical Leader, presented Water and Energy Management: Implications for China.
“Water is the common thread essential to deliver the other basic needs of energy, food, and health—forming the social foundation of communities that we and our customers have a license to operate in,” Dr Rajan said. “When you add in ecosystem services that are required to enhance our quality of life and critical for the travel and tourism sector, we realize that stewardship outside the fences is as important as efficient water use within our commercial properties and our industrial supply chains.”
Dr. Rajan is part of the Ecolab team that co-developed (in partnership with TruCost and Microsoft) the Water Risk Monetizer, a free interactive financial modelling tool which allows operators to understand the true natural resource costs and help ensure the availability of fresh water for future generations.
The Challenge for Organizations
EarthCheck founder and CEO Stewart Moore said the challenge for organizations worldwide is how they improve water efficiency within their own operations, encourage best practices throughout their supply chain and collaborate with internal and external stakeholders to instil sustainable water management solutions.
“When it comes to water resource management, we’ve done the hard yards,” Moore said. “We’ve benchmarked hundreds of hotels throughout the world using science based targets, released two international white papers and developed practical tools and resource kits. What we’ve found is the weakest link in the water-energy nexus is generally poor operational practices.”
WaterCheck was recently developed by EarthCheck and Ecolab to help organizations identify areas for potential improvement in their water management practices. WaterCheck is a risk mapping tool that promotes hotel water stewardship and gives organizations a snapshot of their operation’s water health profile, develop a water-focused action plan and define sustainable future goals.
