Introduction
This paper analyzes the importance of resorts being corporate socially responsible and how it affects environmental issues. Some environmental problems that will be discussed throughout the paper are conservation of water, waste management, energy conservation, and sustainable guest experiences. This paper will clearly define corporate social responsibility and why it is essential to the hospitality sector. I will discuss CSR’s main components, including being discretionary, ethical, legal, and economically socially responsible. The law review that will be evaluated in this essay is the National Perspective on Mountain Resorts and Ecology, 26 Vt. L. Rev. 515. This law review will answer one of the legal questions: how can hotels incorporate legal regulations of environmental problems? The case Massachusetts v. EPA, 549 U.S. 497 describes the importance of staying up to standard with regulations because it can cause negative impacts on the environment. The case will also present the legal repercussions of not following environmental laws.
This paper is divided into four parts. First, a description of CSR and the environmental issues essential to incorporate in any hospitality business. Following that, the background of the law review and the law case. Also will describe the impact of both law case decisions and how they affect the hospitality industry. Lastly, recommendations will be presented to help better companies be sustainable and minimize the chance for legal disputes.
Corporate Social Responsibility
Being corporate social responsibility refers to corporations’ policies and practices to positively influence the world and environment. CSR’s primary focus is to include the best business practices that are pro-social objectives while maximizing profits. Many companies view CSR as an integral part of their brand image, which assumes that customers are more likely to be
drawn to businesses that are perceived to be more ethical. The main components of CSR include being discretionary, ethical, legal, and economically socially responsible. Discretionary social responsibility means providing your companies time and resources to contribute to the community as a whole. This is directly related to the company’s brand image and how it’s meaningful to them. This could include employees volunteering, donating money, service, or charitable organizations. Ethical social responsibility consists of the following legal procedures and being ethically right in all aspects of a business. A company must ensure an ethical workplace while being able to see how the industry impacts the environment. Next is being legally socially responsible, including paying the right taxes, meeting financial obligations, adhering to labor laws, and being overall environmentally safe. Lastly, economic, social responsibility means being profitable and sustainable enough to start giving back. Sustainability includes making a profit for shareholders, paying its employees a fair wage, paying business taxes, and meeting other financial obligations. A corporation can show economic responsibility by being transparent with all stakeholders about the business’s financial status.
CSR also includes sustainable operations within a hotel, which directly affects environmental issues throughout the world. A significant sustainable process includes using waste management, which provides water conservations, energy conservation, sewage treatment, and much more. A sewage treatment plant ensures that no grey water or raw sewage is discharged into the sea. Water conservation is essential because it lowers the consumption of water. Some hotels use a rainwater catchment system that filters and stores rainwater in guestrooms and around the property. Some companies also use a desalination plant that converts saltwater into freshwater, suitable for human consumption. Next is energy conservation, where facilities use eco-friendly light bulbs to optimize natural lighting, uses of solar panels, and more.
Many businesses incorporate nature conservation and protection, which consists of monitoring wildlife and preserving the marine ecosystem. These operations help reduce the consumption of materials created and provide the business with a carbon footprint. Environmental issues can lead to despondency: species extinction, deforestation, desertification, toxic waste, acid rain, global climate change, and severe air and water pollution in large cities and emerging countries.
Historical Background
Corporate law is the body of rules, statutes, regulations, and practices that govern businesses’ operations and formation. Legal debates over corporate social responsibility stretch from the 1930s to the twenty-first century. The traditional discussions over corporate social responsibility revolve around whether the directors and managers of large, publicly held corporations should have a legal duty, when making decisions for the corporation, to take into account not only the needs of the shareholders but also other groups affected by the corporations’ actions, such as its employees, customers, or the communities in which they are based. The first debate over CSR was in 1931, where A.A. Berle and E. Merrick Dodd discussed corporate managers’ responsibilities that owed the stakeholders and others directly influenced by the corporation. Next, I will describe the law review that focuses on how the ecosystem is affected within ski resorts and the legal associations created to protect the land.
National Perspective on Mountain Resorts and Ecology, 26 Vt. L. Rev. 515
The purpose of this legal review is to indicate the United States ski industry’s relationship with its ecosystem. Next, it will determine the Ski industry’s environmental outputs and provide good examples to follow. This review also suggests ways for associations and resorts to reduce their environmental impact. When looking at the ski industry profile, we see that it has been steady for the past twenty years. For example, in the winter of 2001-2002, the number of skiers and snowboarders was 57.3 million people and increased. Due to the popularity of skiing increasing, we see fewer smaller resorts and see more large resorts. Ski areas that at one point were on the bottom of the hill have grown up to the mountain peaks. For instance, trails are cut at higher altitudes going through ecosystems to reach better snow. Sometimes these vast ski resort expansions can displace the character of these rural mountain communities. Today many ski areas are finding ways to reduce any adverse effects that happen with their building. Many trails are not clear cut but instead use gladded paths, which have less burden on the ecosystems. Climate change and global warming has impacted the ski industry and will continue to do so. Due to this vast impact, ski resorts should maximize their efforts to reduce environmental effects resulting from their operations. The NSAA in 1999 presented an open process for stakeholders to help create sustainable slopes that make a ski area environmentally responsible for designing, planning, construction, and public outreach. Sustainable slopes include twenty-one principles designed for ski areas to follow or provide options for getting to that level of CSR.
An excellent example of leadership in action is the Aspen skiing company. They use wind power energy for their lifts, and their building is in regulation with the US Green Building Council’s Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design certification requirements. There is a wide variety of government organizations that are protected by the law to help with sustainability. One of these organizations is the U.S. The Department of Energy intends for businesses to use supplies of clean and affordable energy. “DOE’s research and development programs are producing cutting-edge technologies that can play an integral role in your community’s sustainable development efforts-for example, technologies that make buildings 50% more energy-efficient, that help industries prevent pollution, and that produce electric power from clean, renewable resources.”
My first recommendation for action is providing better leadership to help expand the environmental program, with more information about environments, workshops, training, and marketing. The NSAA should develop a council that helps advise on strategic planning, evolving priorities, and implementing environmental programs. My second recommendation is to increase the power of the public. The public needs to insinuate the demand for superior environmental performance from the NSAA and through a local level. A sustainable slope also needs to achieve a high level of performance, which can be enticed by having an incentive and rewards membership. Sustainable Slopes need to go beyond total values and conservation of energy, waste, and water. It should develop inventories for habitat, species, forests, and wetlands, and conservation quantities for those indicators. A big part of any organization is setting goals that are meant to be achieved in the short and long term.
Legal Issues
Environmental law explains the regulations, statutes, local, national, and international legislation, and treaties. This law is designed to protect the environment from damages and explain the legal consequences of these damages. Environmental law covers the protection of ecology and the health of the environment. The first and most predominant way of seeing environmental law is pollution. There is the enforcement of air standards determined through pollutants emitted through the motor vehicle and industrial processes. Some of these laws are directly focused on placing limitations on these emissions. For example, the DMV requires emission tests for annual vehicle safety checks.
Containment cleanup, prevention, and mitigation directly deal with legal issues of negligence. Regardless of whether such a pollutant leak is avoidable or unavoidable, necessary laws determine what is required of the responsible party. The team accountable for the cleanup should ensure that contamination is first limited and controlled and then removed from an environment to avoid longer-term or large-scale damage. Regulations can also include liability, response, determine the investigation process, monitoring before, during, and after cleanup, and the risk assessment of long-term effects. Any workplace is required to be educated and knowledgeable about the safe use of chemicals. There are chemical safety laws that govern how establishments use these chemicals or which chemicals they shouldn’t use. This means correctly storing chemicals, application of safety equipment, and licenses of storage containers. Waste management laws are governed through laws that enforce transportation and storage and proper disposal and treatment procedures. There are state, federal and international laws that state what we can and cannot do to water sources concerning water quality. Water quality laws concern releasing pollutants into any water body, be it surface water, drinking water supply, water table, rivers, seasons, and oceans. Next, I will be explaining the effects and issues of global warming.
Global Warming
The first legal issue to address climate change was in 19992 when the United Nations Framework Convention on climate change took place. This connection was the stepping stone in law-related topics dealing with global warming, but it was still struggling to make federal, state, and regional laws. The first report to entice attention on an international level was the 1990 Assessment Report, which described greenhouse gas emissions. This report showed how greenhouse gases affected the earth’s surface’s substantial warming, which was beyond natural occurrence. Six leading greenhouse gases contribute to global warming, but the main gas is carbon dioxide. In the United States, the main human activities that create greenhouse gases are transportation, power generation, industry, agriculture, and commercial buildings. Overall, the increase in greenhouse gases is caused by the entire economy, which means everyone has a part in global warming and must reduce the issue. In December 1997, the UNFCCC created a binding contract from 37 industrialized nations and the European community to reduce GHG emissions to an average of below the 1990s level. These nations agreed to make nation-specific targets to reduce GHG emissions in the summer of 1997, the U.S. On a 95-0 vote, the Senate created a resolution that opposed any treaty that failed to have duties to help reduce GHG emissions. This protocol is put into three mechanisms: emission trading, clean development mechanism, and joint implementation. Nowadays, we have a vast amount of laws for climate change. One of the more recent laws is the Consolidated Appropriations Act that renews tax credit programs for wind and solar electricity generation. It also incorporated a phase-out schedule for these support programs that provide stability for the renewable energy market. Overall, global warming is a pressing issue affecting everyone globally, and it is vital to continue to find new ways of reducing our emissions and creating sustainable practices. In the next section, I will be overviewing Massachusetts v. EPA, a crucial case that started implementing global warming laws and regulations.
Massachusetts v. EPA, 549 U.S. 497
I will first describe the background of the case; some private organizations filed a petition that asked the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to regulate the emissions of the four greenhouse gases, which include carbon dioxide in the § 202(a)(1) of the Clean Air Act. This clean air act depends on the EPA to provide standards that apply to any pollutant emission from motor vehicles. The EPA stated the action did not authorize to make mandatory regulations to address climate change, or even if they had the authority to set greenhouse emission standards, and they wouldn’t. The Agency further characterized any EPA regulation of motor-vehicle emissions as an approach to climate change that would conflict with the President’s comprehensive approach involving additional technological innovation support. Two of the judges agreed with the EPA that they properly exercised the denying of the rulemaking petition. However, one judge concluded that the exercise of judgment could be based on scientific uncertainty and other factors. The second judge stated that the petitioners hadn’t provided any personal injury necessary to establish a standing, which the court denied for a review.
Global warming is one of the most pressing environmental issues of our time. Even though global warming affects our planet in every way, the government doesn’t address it enough. Petitioners have come to the courts because they are unsatisfied with the elected branches’ progress. The legal question that is presented is, Does anything require the administrator to make a “judgment” whenever a petition for rulemaking is filed? By a 5-4 vote versed the D.C. Circuit and ruled in favor of Massachusetts. Justice John Paul Stevens stated that Massachusetts had the standing to sue EPA over potential damage caused to its territory by global warming. The Court rejected the EPA’s argument that the Clean Air Act was not meant to refer to carbon emissions in the section giving the EPA authority to regulate air pollution agents. The majority ruled that the unjustified in delaying its decision based on prudential and policy considerations.
The result from the case was that greenhouse gases from mobile sources were considered air pollutants. Under the CAA, the EPA was obligated to “cause or contribute to air pollution which may reasonably be anticipated to endanger health or welfare.” In May 2010, the EPA and National Highway Traffic Safety Administration created regulations for GHGs from cars and light trucks under Title II of the Clean Air Act. With the GHG emissions being regulated by the CAA, the EPA had new interpretations of the Clean Air Act. The EPA implemented and promulgated regulations for sources under the new source performance standards and recent source review. Developed from the Clean Air Act of 1963, the Clean Power Plan establishes state targets for reducing carbon emissions and offers a flexible time frame for states to achieve those targets.
As a manager, it is essential to understand the importance of environmental sustainability practices. As a manager, you must be educated to motivate employees to participate in these sustainable practices. When being educated, you can also guide the managers to decide which environmental policies are suitable for their hotel. For a business to become more sustainable, a manager will also need help from associations or the government to provide education and training. The manager must entice their employees when they try to get them to engage in sustainable development. The sustainable development strategy will be adaptable due to each business because the location, property, and staff are different. An essential factor is communication from a manager because a sustainable development strategy must be well prepared. The goals must be communicated to the ownership, management company, and executive committee. This allows stakeholders to invest and support the sustainability movement. To a management company and shareholder, sustainability provides property costs and generates revenue and brand image. The triple bottom line keeps them focused on delivering profit while helping the community and environment to the employees and management. As a manager, I would want to start with a PowerPoint that demonstrates what sustainability is about, what countries are currently doing with this matter and show CSR initiatives in large and well-known corporations. I would also want to incorporate how local authorities or businesses are including sustainability within their establishments. To display such a strategy’s seriousness, include it in the property’s mission statement and values and introduce it to potential employees during the interview process to trigger a conversation and engage the employees from the beginning of their association to the hotel. It is also essential to get feedback from your employees by asking what they would like to see benign added to the property strategy. Recognition is necessary by celebrating and communicating internally and externally. To achieve sustainability in any business, everyone must want to participate and be involved with the process. To keep employees engaged, it’s crucial to develop new ideas to implement and new ways to recognize individuals for succeeding.
Conclusion
Corporate social responsibility and having sustainable business practices are important ways for businesses to give back to the world while getting returns on investments. Global warming continues to become a substantial problem throughout the world as we continue to grow and industrialize. There is a vast amount of environmental issues caused by global warming, and we must help in every way we can. Businesses and individuals need to be following ecological laws and doing their part to help reduce greenhouse gas emissions. From a legal standpoint, in this paper, we could see why it is vital to keep people liable for being environmentally safe. Environmental laws must stay in effect while adapting to new issues or new developments in technology.
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