Melody Melo-Rijk, WWF’s Project Manager for Sustainable Consumption and Production in the Philippines, was one of the panelists for Panel Session B: Transforming Tourism Value Chains for Resource Efficient and Low Carbon Development. She discussed how and why food became a vital part of WWF’s conservation work globally. “While we are now called the World Wide Fund for Nature, we were once popularly known as the World Wildlife Fund, which means that people mostly associate us with wildlife protection. But we have realized that, in order to truly protect global and local species, we have to broaden our horizons and expand our projects to also cover climate and energy, forests, oceans, and even food,” says Melo-Rijk. “Food production and consumption has environmental impacts. In the tourism and hospitality sector, we often think that transport would be the highest source of greenhouse gas emissions but it is actually food. Transport only contributes 14% to global greenhouse gas emissions, but agriculture and livestock production contributes 18%.”

Diving deep on what it means to be sustainable, Melo-Rijk explained how the three key elements of sustainability should be present in the tourism industry, particularly in the foodservice sector. “Sustainability has three elements - minimizing the use of resources, minimizing the production of pollutants and waste, and considering the needs of future generations in all of our processes. One of the ways we can actually be sustainable is by reducing our food mileage, which means that instead of us importing or having something delivered from somewhere far away, we can try to see if we have local producers who can provide us with the same raw materials,” says Melo-Rijk. “When we source from local producers, we are also contributing to the local economy, and when we know who produced our food, we are also promoting traceability. These are all key considerations to not only sustainable dining, but also sustainable sourcing.”