VisitDenmark and the Green Meetings Industry Council have launched a new "Meeting the Future" initiative on the United Nations World Environment Day, celebrated on 5 June, aimed at consolidating the global meetings industry’s sustainability efforts.
As host nation for the next UN Climate Change Conference (COP15) in December 2009, Denmark’s official tourist board VisitDenmark has joined forces with the Green Meeting Industry Council (GMIC) to pool the tremendous efforts of meetings industry professionals worldwide and make meetings more sustainable in the future.
Nowadays, the biggest challenge facing the global meetings industry – transportation providers, destination management corporations, agencies, hotel chains, meeting venues, trade associations etc. – is the adoption of sustainability measures. To date, the meetings industry has not taken any steps in this respect. Many key players are addressing sustainability using different approaches, but there is a lack of cohesion and no common direction.
“Meeting the Future” is an initiative developed to create a unified, integrated and cohesive global response to climate change from the meetings industry. At the Green Meetings Industry Council’s annual conference in Vancouver on 22 February 2008, the two organisations met with a number of the meetings industry’s key players and agreed to address the issues raised by VisitDenmark and put forward tangible solutions in order to face the challenge. The chief objectives will be to bring together the meetings industry leadership to discuss, create and agree on a unified global response to climate change within all sectors of the meetings industry and to produce an industry position paper that can be submitted at the UN conference.
Following the Vancouver conference, VisitDenmark appointed a “Meeting the Future” steering committee including representatives from, amongst others, MCI, Reed Travel Exhibitions and Meeting Strategies Worldwide, who have been busy preparing a first draft of the industry statement. The final results will be presented at the United Nation’s Climate Change Conference (COP15) held in Copenhagen, Denmark in December 2009.
To ensure that “Meeting the Future” initiative truly reflects the needs of the whole meetings industry, the Steering Committee wishes to extend participation in this scheme to a much wider audience by encouraging the active involvement of meetings industry organisations and associations worldwide.
