First SUNx climate-friendly travel think tank releases calls to act & act now

The key calls to action from the inaug­ur­al SUN^x — Strong Uni­ver­sal Net­work Cli­mate Friendly Travel Think Tank that con­cluded in Malta were (accord­ing to the offi­cial press release):

• The Cli­mate Crisis is eXist­en­tial. All stake­hold­ers includ­ing Trans­port, Hos­pit­al­ity, Travel Ser­vices, and Infra­struc­ture Pro­viders must urgently start the trans­form­a­tion in 2020 to get onto the Par­is 1.5^o tra­ject­ory with­in the next 7- 10 years. Gov­ern­ments, Com­pan­ies, com­munit­ies and con­sumers, must all engage and take action now.
• “Cli­mate Friendly Travel”. Under the ban­ner of Cli­mate Friendly Travel, the industry must adopt this as an imper­at­ive and the new norm.
• Fully trans­form­ing all modes of trans­port was seen as pivotal. SUN^x Malta’s call for a Moon-shot approach for avi­ation to fur­ther accel­er­ate tech­no­lo­gic­al research and deploy­ment was strongly sup­por­ted, which must include the imme­di­ate dis­tri­bu­tion and rap­id scal­ing up of cur­rently avail­able solu­tions to sub­stan­tially reduce avi­ation fossil fuel reliance. 
• Cli­mate Fin­an­cing. Cit­ing the Green New Deal as an example, the Travel & Tour­ism sec­tor must engage more act­ively with emer­ging Green Fin­ance pro­grams to be able to secure adequate funds for trans­form­a­tion. High qual­ity off­set­ting of car­bon impacts were seen as short-term trans­ition instru­ments but totally inad­equate as a long-term solu­tion. In this con­text it was broadly believed that avi­ation action to date was fall­ing behind the rap­idly intensi­fy­ing trans­form­a­tion need.
• Emer­ging innov­a­tions and tech­no­lo­gies. Build­ing refur­bish­ment, cruise ship­ping, car­bon reduc­tion, waste to fuel trans­form­a­tion, devel­op­ing con­sumer beha­viour and digit­al opportunities. 
• The SUN^x Malta Cli­mate Friendly Travel Registry of Ambi­tions was reviewed and endorsed, as was the ini­ti­at­ive with WISeKey to devel­op an innov­at­ive con­sumer facing secure platform.
• Edu­ca­tion of the Next Gen­er­a­tion was under­scored as a high pri­or­ity with an emphas­is on an accred­ited Gradu­ate Dip­loma, from the Gozo Insti­tute of Tour­ism Stud­ies Cam­pus. The SUN^x Malta 100,000 STRONG Cli­mate Friendly Travel Cham­pi­ons and as well as its school’s pro­gram is a very pos­it­ive step for­ward to sup­port com­pany and com­munity trans­form­a­tion. Addi­tion­ally, improv­ing the research base was under­scored on both decar­bon­iz­a­tion and sec­tor resilience.

Pro­fess­or Geof­frey Lip­man, Pres­id­ent SUN^x Malta said: “We must act now and we must act fast. We’re already see­ing with the emer­ging Malta col­lab­or­at­ive frame­work between Gov­ern­ment and the Travel & Tour­ism Sup­ply Chain, that a pion­eer­ing approach can achieve this. It can be rep­lic­ated around the world, as States seek to ful­fil their Par­is Agree­ment Nation­ally Determ­ined Contributions.”

SUN^x — Strong Uni­ver­sal Net­work is a “GT” Insight Partner.

A note from your cor­res­pond­ent: The italicised text above is all copied and pas­ted from the offi­cial press release. One feels that there are assump­tions of pri­or know­ledge or under­stand­ing of what was dis­cussed at the Think Tank event embed­ded into some of these calls to action. It would be easy to nod blankly and move on, but should any read­er have cause to ques­tion any­thing, please leave a note in the com­ments below or Con­tact “GT” and “GT” will put it to SUN^x.

Fea­tured image: By Thommas68 (CC0) via Pixabay.