BEN WEBB

I’ve sat through enough values statements to know the exact moment one dies. It’s on the slide it was printed on, somewhere between the applause and the coffee. So when Tourism Australia stood up at Destination Australia and announced another sustainability promise, the Green and Gold Promise, I braced for the usual.

Then they attached a toolkit. Something an operator could actually pick up and use. That changes the nature of the thing entirely, and for anyone delivering a tourism or hospitality project, it changes what lands on your desk.

Here’s the difference in delivery terms. A sustainability principle is unmanageable. You can’t put “embrace responsible travel” on a project plan, assign it, or test whether it’s done. A sustainability requirement, with a mechanism attached, is a scope item. It has an owner, a cost, a deadline and an acceptance test. The toolkit is what converts a nice sentiment into something a delivery lead can actually build to.

This matters because sustainability is quietly becoming a hard requirement in tourism projects, not a soft aspiration. Guests are filtering out properties that don’t meet a standard. Governments are writing frameworks. Funding and approvals increasingly carry environmental conditions. Which means the sustainability line is migrating from the vision statement into the actual specification, and a project that treats it as decoration is going to meet it late, expensively, as a retrofit.

I’ve watched requirements arrive this way before: fuzzy and inspirational at the start of a project, then suddenly concrete and non-negotiable near the end, when someone realises the funding or the approval depends on them. The cost of meeting a requirement you designed for is small. The cost of bolting it on after the fact is brutal. Retrofitting sustainability into a building that’s already framed, or a supply chain already contracted, is the expensive way to do everything.

So what does a delivery lead do with a toolkit like this?

You translate it into scope at the front end. Go through the framework and turn each relevant principle into a specific, testable requirement in the project brief. Not “be sustainable” but “source X per cent locally,” “hit Y energy standard,” “divert Z of construction waste.” Vague requirements produce vague delivery and disputes at handover.

You assign it an owner. A requirement nobody owns is a requirement nobody meets. Sustainability that belongs to “everyone” belongs to no one and surfaces as a gap at the worst possible moment.

You price it honestly and early. Sustainable specification often costs more upfront and less over the asset’s life. That’s a business case conversation to have while the numbers are still soft, not a surprise to spring on a sponsor mid-build.

And you build the acceptance test in from the start. How will you prove you met the standard? Certification, measurement, audit? If you can’t test it, you can’t claim it, and in a market where guests and regulators are checking, an unprovable green claim is a liability, not an asset.

The toolkit is the useful part precisely because it makes the commitment testable. A framework you can’t act on is a nicely worded intention. A framework with a mechanism is a specification. The operators who treat Tourism Australia’s toolkit as the second thing, and fold it into their scope at the brief rather than the handover, are the ones who’ll meet the standard without the retrofit bill.

So the question for any tourism project on the drawing board: is sustainability written into your scope as a testable requirement, or floating above it as a sentiment? Because one of those gets delivered, and the other gets discovered, usually too late to be cheap.

Related: Local sourcing is a supply chain with a conscience and Overtourism is a stakeholder you forgot to count.

Ben Webb is an award-winning project leader and delivery strategist. He was named Australian Institute of Project Management Project Manager of the Year in 2022 and nominated for the IPMA World Project Manager of the Year in 2023.