The Missing Link: How Hospitality Could Turn Vision Into Impact

At every sustainability summit, the air hums with conviction, and a touch of contradiction.

It’s a strange mix, if we’re being honest.

There are veterans of extractive industries focused on legacy and redemption. There are opportunists, founders, financiers, and crypto-converts, scenting the next market frontier in prosperity and self-actualisation. And then there are the sustainability lifers: practitioners fluent in STEM, policy, and pragmatism, now learning to translate impact and externalities into ROI and EBITDA just to be understood.

It’s an ecosystem of guilt, hope, and grit, united by urgency, divided by language, resources, and intent.

Capital wants returns. Practitioners want renewal. And somewhere between the spreadsheets and the soil, there are still many missing links.

The translation gap

Global climate finance nearly doubled between 2019 and 2022, reaching USD 1.3 trillion annually (Climate Policy Initiative, 2023). Yet most of that capital flows into energy infrastructure, not into the embodied systems where sustainability becomes visible: food, travel, and hospitality.

The UN’s State of Finance for Nature 2023 found that roughly USD 7 trillion each year still funds activities that harm nature, while only USD 200 billion supports nature-positive solutions. The global food system alone operates at a USD 3 trillion annual deficit once you factor in health and environmental costs.

Despite this massive deficit (and opportunity), the OECD reports persistent risk aversion. Early-stage investors prefer scalable tech to place-based innovation, viewing hotels and restaurants as “capital-intensive” and slow to scale, and deployment to smallholders as extremely complicated.

Given how much food systems shape wellbeing, and how tourism supports regional economies, environments, and cultures, the question becomes: what will it take to connect capital with localised contexts?

Hospitality as the systems integrator

Tourism contributes 10% of global GDP and one in ten jobs worldwide (WTTC 2024). It’s not a niche; it’s a circulatory system connecting agriculture, logistics, energy, design, and culture.

In some countries, food and tourism combined can influence 30-70% of total economic activity. In Singapore, tourism’s output multiplier of 1.97 exceeds the national average of 1.38, meaning every dollar spent nearly doubles its impact through local suppliers and jobs.

A hotel that rethinks waste becomes a miniature city. A restaurant sourcing within its bioregion becomes a living supply chain. A resort that rewilds its grounds becomes a classroom for biodiversity.

There are ripple effects when systems are connected, especially when travellers engage with purpose.

As Harvard’s David Kolb demonstrated, people learn and change through experience more effectively than abstraction. It’s why the Ellen MacArthur Foundation calls hospitality a key “activation sector” for the circular economy: where policy becomes participation.

So, where’s all the capital?

Scope 3: the invisible majority

In both hospitality and food, Scope 3 emissions, the indirect supply-chain impacts, dwarf everything else. They’re 13 times higher than Scopes 1 and 2 for hospitality, and 23 times higher for food and beverage.

Yet fewer than 5% of hospitality companies reporting to CDP disclose them.

The Science Based Targets initiative (SBTi) acknowledged this complexity in its 2025 revision, introducing “indirect mitigation measures” to account for the difficulty of tracing upstream emissions.

In Singapore, only 4% of SMEs feel confident about meeting upcoming climate-reporting mandates, leading to five-year deferrals. Listed firms begin reporting Scopes 1 and 2 this year; Scope 3 next year, which many are terrified about, or looking for ways to defer.

Simply put: we can’t fix what we can’t trace. And hospitality, sitting between producer and consumer, is uniquely positioned to make the invisible visible, and support developing the processes to solve this.

That, of course, takes resourcing, technology, and expertise to stitch the ecosystem together.

From conflict minerals to conscious menus

A smartphone contains more than 40 minerals sourced from around the world, many from conflict regions. Few of us could name one. Food is no different.

75% of consumers say supply-chain transparency influences their choices, and 65% would switch brands for greater traceability. Yet few could describe where their last meal began. The absence of truth is convenient, and often very profitable.

When sustainability is niche and not fairly supported, it’s hard to compete with extractive alternatives. (Reference green premiums and brown discounts.)

Platforms such as TraceX and FutureLog now trace produce from farm to fork, offering immutable records of provenance. But integration remains patchy, geography and context matter.

This is where hospitality can lead: by turning provenance into participation, transparency into theatre.

We’re already seeing a rise in farm hotels and experiential agritourism, travellers seeking authenticity, connection, and meaning.

And I’m a big believer in the more digital we are becoming, the more we want to escape it in our resets.

We are animals and a part of nature, after all.

The monetisation-meaning balance

As capital converges on regeneration, monetisation accelerates.

Call it “What’s-in-it-for-me-ism.” The risk is we stall care while building defensible IP, the next financial product to package and sell.

We’ve lived through greenwashing. Now we’re watching well-washing: purpose-branded ventures chasing the safest, fastest returns. The result is a hollowing-out of innovation at the edges, where risk, creativity, and true impact live.

Economist Kate Raworth warns that “a green economy built on extractive logic is still extractive.” And as Porter and Kramer wrote in Harvard Business Review, embedding social progress within profit engines builds long-term resilience.

We need courage to fund non-financial return projects, treating cultural, social, and ecological capital as critical infrastructure.

Because diplomacy, education, and hospitality all sit within the same soft systems that hold societies together, and we have seen first-hand what happens this year when we withdraw from these initiatives.

If we truly want holistic change, every layer of the ecosystem must engage: capital, policy, community, and culture, in dialogue, not hierarchy.

Hospitality sits naturally in that equilibrium.

Healthy systems create more than they consume, and distribute value through every link in their chain.

Joy as infrastructure

For all its spreadsheets and standards, sustainability depends on emotion, often complex emotion. (Recommend reading: Human Nature: Nine Ways to Feel About Our Changing Planet by Kate Marvel if you need help unpacking some of this.)

Hospitality runs on warmth, wonder and joy.

As Barbara Fredrickson found, positive emotion broadens awareness and increases openness to new behaviour. Pleasure isn’t the enemy of change; it’s the engine.

We learn through play.

Tourism Australia’s Regenerative Tourism pilot found that guests were far more likely to engage in conservation when framed as part of a hospitality experience.

“Tourism is not just an economic activity; it is a vector for cultural and environmental transformation.” — Zurab Pololikashvili, UNWTO Secretary-General

When joy and purpose converge, participation follows.

That’s regenerative leadership.

The bridge ahead

Sustainability doesn’t need more theory. It needs traction. Capital has the vision. Practitioners have the methods. Hospitality provides the interface: a low-risk, high-impact sector where regeneration becomes lived experience.

It requires translators, integrators, and conveners, people who can move between the balance sheet and the kitchen, the policy brief and the plate.

Because the future won’t be built in boardrooms. It will be felt around our tables, with the people and places we love most.

And even though there are elements of contraction, it’s within this friction, and the constructive collaboration of multiple viewpoints, that real change begins to happen.

Andrew Cameron is the founder of ENZYME, a Singapore-based advisory working at the intersection of regenerative hospitality, food systems, and sustainable procurement across Asia-Pacific.