In line with Sustainable Development Goal 17 on partnerships for development, the ESG Framework for Tourism Businesses project brings together business, academics and the multilateral system to co-design a measurement tool that will improve monitoring of how tourism businesses impact, and depend on, people, the planet and prosperity.

The SDG Lab was co-founded in 2021 by ODID’s Professor Alexander Betts. The new framework is supported by easyJet holidays, the SDG Lab’s founding partner. 

While a number of ESG reporting and disclosure initiatives already exist they have been developed relatively independently. As a result, ESG reporting is not done in a standardised manner across organisations, meaning its comparability and scalability is limited. In this context, the SDG Lab and UNWTO are joining efforts to develop a harmonised ESG framework that can be used as a reference by tourism businesses.

UNWTO and the SDG Lab will carry out a comprehensive mapping of current work, interview businesses in the accommodation and reservation services industries, and carry out further research and development.

Based on this work, UNWTO plans to issue a first beta version of the ESG Tourism Framework for accommodation and reservation services, with a view to extending it into additional tourism industries over 2024 before launching a finalized, agreed version for global uptake.

The SDG Impact Lab brings together the research expertise of Oxford University with partners across industry sectors, to address the most pressing challenges of our time. The Lab’s programmes enable talented graduate students to collaborate with non-academic partners to identify creative, interdisciplinary solutions that advance the UN SDGs.