Green Meetings and Sustainable Business

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Sustainability is a journey – not a destination (Goldblatt, 2012). The purpose of this essay is to determine the degree to which this journey towards sustainability has begun in the case of the business events, also known as MICE (Meetings Incentives, Conferences and Exhibitions) industry.

Endorsement of the Bruntland Report (WCED, 1987) by the United Nations and its members at the Earth brought prominence to the concepts of sustainability and sustainable development (Drexhage and Murphy, 2010).

There are several definitions of Sustainable Development, the most popular one being “development which meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs” which was proposed within the same report ( WCED ,1987,p43.) . Despite the different definitions proposed by various authors (Harris et al. 2001, Sharachchandra 1991) they agree on certain key concepts that comprise the definition of sustainable development. These are inter and intra generational equity of resources, a long term rather than a myopic perspective, and the integration of the environment, economy and society. The last concept is also known as the triple bottom line, which consists of People, Planet, Profit (Elkington, 1998). People imply the society or the social dimension, planet implies the environmental dimension and profit implies the economic dimension.

The Economic dimension is concerned with matters involving the flow of money such as costs, income, employment, revenue etc., the environmental with matters that represent natural resources such as pollution, wastage, and depletion of non-renewable energy, the social with matters involving the society and people such as health and wellbeing, social equity, ...

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...ty of Technology, Sydney.

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World Commission on Environment and Development (WCED) (1987). Our Common Future; Oxford University Press, New York.

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