Bangkok – The Tourism Authority of Thailand (TAT) has acted to advance its sustainability agenda with a tailor-made communications training course designed to mainstream the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) right across the Thai travel and tourism industry.
This course will help communicators better connect their individual corporate activities to all the 17 UN SDGs, brainstorm ideas to action them, and measure their impact.
Mr. Yuthasak Supasorn, TAT Governor, said, “This is TAT’s intention to not only just promote responsible and sustainable tourism, but also the UN Sustainable Development Goals and the year of Thailand’s Chairmanship of ASEAN, which is under the theme of ‘Advancing Partnership for Sustainability’. This will help the Thai travel and tourism industry maintain the track required by the U.N. in the upcoming ten-year period of 2020-2030, which is the ‘Decade of Delivery’ of the SDGs.”
Mr. Imtiaz Muqbil, Executive Editor of Travel Impact Newswire, lecturer of this course, has designed the manual comprising six modules, which establish the complementarities between the UN SDGs, the ASEAN Socio-cultural Blueprint, the UN World Tourism Organisation sustainability agenda, the Sufficiency Economy Philosophy of King Rama IX the Great, as well as the Thailand 4.0 policy directions.
Establishing the complementarities between these global, regional and national agendas is a core theme of Thailand’s 2019 Chairmanship of ASEAN. However, converting those policies and plans into action can only happen if the public and private sectors better understand their relevance, and how the recommendations can be practically applied at the grassroots level.
Mrs. Srisuda Wanapinyosak, Deputy Governor for International Marketing (Europe, Africa, Middle East and Americas) said, “TAT is gearing up to ensure that the industry’s future growth trajectory does not exact a social, cultural and environmental cost.”
The manual’s title, “Beyond Plastic to Peace, Prosperity and Development Justice” was derived from the need to reduce plastic and food waste and focus on more deeper and complex issues that the industry is working intensively on through various campaigns.
Mr. Tanes Petsuwan, Deputy Governor for Marketing Communications said, “As we prepare to mark the sixtieth anniversary of TAT’s founding in 2020, there is no doubt that we have to raise the cause of sustainability and management to a whole new level.”
