The GDS-Index team warmly welcomes Dubai to our collaborative platform highlighting best practices and responsible business tourism initiatives. We are delighted to see this leadership from Dubai Business Events and its stakeholders across the city.

As a key area of focus for the city’s leadership, issues around sustainability are of paramount importance across all sectors in Dubai, with tourism and business events being no exception. The city has already made great strides to become more sustainable, with further developments, including meeting a goal to produce 75 per cent of its energy requirements from clean sources by 2050.

Dubai Tourism’s own Dubai Sustainable Tourism initiative is seeing hotels and other hospitality establishments across the city adopt best practices in the area of sustainability. It works with leading industry partners to encourage a city-wide implementation of the latest energy, water and fuel-efficient technologies that engage and empower hospitality establishments to integrate sustainability practices within their operations, with many realising immediate savings.

Meanwhile, the city’s (and region’s) largest events space, Dubai World Trade Centre, has also adopted a number of sustainability measures, including the extensive installation of solar panels on its roof and provisions to ensure excess food is provided to food banks.

Dubai Business Events, part of Dubai Tourism and the city’s official convention bureau, understands that sustainability is an increasingly important factor for meetings planners and associations to consider when selecting host cities for their events. It anticipates that, by working with the GDS-Index team, it can quantify the efforts made in Dubai and demonstrate to the industry that they can maintain high standards for sustainability when they bring events to the city.