Simple solutions to meet organizational ESG targets with Skift meetings

Skift Take: With corporate environmental, social, and governance (ESG) goals taking center stage, meeting and event professionals will need to prioritize stronger sustainability measures while carefully tracking their impact. Here are practical tools and resources that will help turn those goals into reality.

Around the world, institutions and corporations are working to do their part to reduce the effects of climate change by setting ambitious environmental, social, and governance (ESG) goals that reduce environmental impact while increasing positive community change. Today, the most successful organizations are committed to environmental protection, social responsibility, and more mindful corporate governance.

For meeting and event professionals, these ESG targets present a new challenge: Meeting professionals will need to integrate more sustainability practices into their events and will also have to report on that progress. Ultimately, that means learning to measure and report on their hard work — an intimidating task for anyone. Between different sources of emissions and ways to measure emissions, it can be an academic exercise. With the addition of the social priorities included in ESG goals, it’s easy to feel overwhelmed.

That’s why Hilton has been pioneering a set of Meet with Purpose resources to help guide meeting and event professionals. These resources help not only with hosting more environmentally sustainable events but also measuring and reporting their impact. It’s all part of Hilton’s ESG strategy to drive responsible travel for the travel and tourism industry, called Travel with Purpose. Across its vast hotel portfolio, Hilton has set aggressive and science-backed 2030 targets to reduce emissions as well as water and waste, ultimately leading the way toward a net zero future. Between 2008 and 2022, Hilton reduced emissions intensity across its portfolio of hotels by 44 percent, water consumption by 38 percent, and waste by 58 percent. Hilton has proven that working together to advance mutual ESG initiatives creates a win-win for Hilton and its customers, who often have their own company-wide sustainability benchmarks to meet. That’s why Hilton provides its customers with resources that:

• Help them understand the environmental impact of their transient and group stays through LightStay, Hilton’s award-winning and proprietary ESG management system.
• Estimate the carbon footprint of individual meetings and events using Hilton’s Meeting Impact Calculator.
• Leverage Hilton’s Meet with Purpose Checklist to lower the impact of meetings or events from the start.

Measuring and reporting

It’s no secret that ESG reporting starts with being able to measure your impact, but it’s not always clear what that means in practical terms. Hilton is making this level of insight a realistic goal for meeting and event professionals everywhere.