Sustainable conferences

Bonn is the only German UN city and is home to 18 secretariats, which deal with global topics of the future such as climate protection, desertification, water balance, soil and species protection. In addition, more than 150 international organisations are located around the UN hub in the Bonn region. This means that over the last few years a network has arisen that has created a synergy for leading international conferences on the topics of sustainability as well as for events that are geared to sustainability. Every year international UN conferences with far-reaching appeal take place in the region including for example the annual UN climate conferences and contracting state and various international environmental conferences.

In this connection, the Sustainable Bonn – sustainable conference location – project was established in 2006 and is based at Tourismus & Congress GmbH. More than 50 companies from the hotel trade, catering industry, conference technology, transport and culture have now been made aware of sustainability in the Bonn region.

As part of the business quality initiative MICE market of the future, the EU (EFRE) funded project of Tourism NRW is giving the local project Sustainable Bonn the opportunity to stretch beyond local borders and thus spreading the idea of sustainable management concepts to further tourist subregions in NRW. In cooperation with scienece&research institutions in NRW the continuous process of sustainable development in small and medium size enterprises, will be taken a step forward by the development of sustainability standards for tourism service providers. NRW sustainability standards will be tested on the already certified Sustainable Bonn partners as well as other tourism related enterprises in NRW. The Sustainable Bonn approach is continuously demonstrating its Role model capability for similar Green Meetings initiatives in other European countries.

Because of the sister city partnership between Bonn and Bukhara in Uzbekistan, the sustainable Bonn project was able to be adopted as a pilot project of the sustainable tourism initiative of Bukhara.Chengdu in China is yet another sister city of Bonn that is currently adapting the low-level sustainable Bonn approach in the tourism industry of specific city quarters of Chengdu City.

The Sustainable Bonn project

The participating companies have committed themselves to act and manage their businesses sustainably. They are provided with intensive support in this from an external consultancy and compile their own sustainability strategy, which they can also implement independently.

Sustainable Bonn is primarily directed at the hotel trade, the catering and conference industry in Bonn and promotes the practical implementation of the principle of sustainability, focussing on:

• ecology: the use of environmental technology and reducing the use of resources
• economy: lowering operational costs and using innovative technologies
• Social aspects: Maintaining/creating jobs and employee motivation

By improving the sustainable economic situation with Sustainable Bonn – sustainable conference location, an effective contribution is made to reducing the pressure on the environment, taking account of social aspects and at the same time achieving economic success.

Consulting for sustainable events

Many factors are involved to organise conferences, meetings and seminars sustainably:

• the option of low-emission travel to and from the event for guests,
• service-providers, who sign up to a sustainability strategy,
• paperless registration,
• CO2-compensation and much more.

The Bonn Region Convention Bureau of T&C together with its partners offers you professional advice on anything associated with the subject of green meetings. You can benefit from the partners of Sustainable Bonn, who will organise your event sustainably.

The sustainability concept is also followed by the hotel booking system of Tourismus & Congress GmbH, BONNHOTELS.de. It combines room booking with free travel on the public transport system (ÖPNV) during the entire stay in the Bonn region.