Thanks for the response Amanda, but in addition to receiving 250 Priority Club Rewards points, when switching to paperless (E-statements), you will be also saving the environment, by limiting the usage of paper as well as supporting the IHG/Oxford partnership all at the same time.
Please see below for details.
Story behind IHG/Oxford Partnership:
IHG (InterContinental Hotels Group), the world’s largest hotel company, and the University of Oxford have joined forces to accelerate vital research into conservation, with IHG pledging up to $1million over a five year period to help Oxford increase its research capability.
IHG is using its Priority Club Rewards (PCR) scheme to fund the programme by asking members to switch from paper to online statements. There are over 44 million PCR members worldwide making it the world’s largest hotel loyalty programme and this simple change will have a huge financial and environmental benefit. Switching to online statements will save IHG up to $400,000 every year and the hotel group will donate half of all savings made directly to the Department of Plant Sciences at Oxford University.
David Jerome, IHG’s senior vice president for corporate responsibility, said:
“We recognise our responsibility to find innovative solutions to the environmental, social and economic effects of travel. We’re committed to developing and operating hotels in a responsible way. Oxford University is the perfect partner to help us to better understand biodiversity, address environmental concerns and ultimately safeguard the world’s favourite tourist destinations for generations to come.”
Professor Jane Langdale, Head of Oxford University’s Department of Plant Sciences, said:
“Recognising and conserving plant biodiversity is vital if we are to save fragile ecosystems and pave the way for sustainable economic development. IHG’s generous support will enable us to significantly expand our efforts to gather detailed information about plant biodiversity hot spots around the world, and to make this information available to those working at a local level to conserve plant species.
“It will also help us to answer fundamental questions such as why biodiversity is distributed globally in the way that it is, and how biodiversity hot spots may respond to the impacts of climate change and human activity.”
Compiling the basic facts of what plants exist and where they live today on a fine scale is fundamental to most decisions about conservation as our knowledge of plants and their distributions is surprisingly incomplete. Working with local communities and scientists, Oxford’s research will help to pinpoint and publicise areas on our planet - small areas in some cases - that have the greatest concentration of rare and threatened plants, any one of which could one day be useful to all of us. Here are just a few examples of the Oxford research and how IHG support will help:
· Peru & Bolivia: Working together with local botanists recent fieldwork by Oxford University scientists in the Andes, one of the world’s hottest plant diversity hot spots, has uncovered more than 100 plants new to science just in the last decade. These include a whole new genus of plants named Maraniona, (a distant relative of our familiar peas and beans) lurking in the Marañon Valley in Peru; and the Charango tree, Aspidosperma resonans used to make traditional musical instruments in Bolivia. Support from IHG will help Oxford scientists to discover and describe many more new plant species and make a major contribution to the mammoth task of assembling a complete catalogue of the world’s plants.
· Ghana, Trinidad and Tobago: Using rapid survey techniques developed at Oxford, small teams rapidly scanned all of Ghana’s extensive forests and pinpointed parts of the landscape with high concentrations of globally rare species. These local hot spots were prioritised for special protection, and 28 areas have now been set aside within a matrix of productive forest. Meanwhile, a three-year survey in Trinidad and Tobago by Oxford and local botanists has recorded as many records of plants and their precise habitats as could be deduced from the herbarium after two centuries of historical collecting. Approximately 50 plant species are known in only this location and many more are globally rare. West Africa and the Caribbean are both important target areas for future IHG-supported research as development in these places is in danger of sweeping away vegetation before we even know the botanical diversity that exists.
· Brazil: The Oxford team will, with IHG support, continue to develop the specialised biodiversity information technology that is vital for managing and disseminating very large volumes of botanical data. For example, using the BRAHMS (Botanical Research And Herbarium Management System) database system developed at Oxford, research institutions in Brazil have been steadily gathering information over the last decade to reveal the botanical wealth of the Amazon basin.
Current web developments are revolutionising the way we view and manage plant resources in the 21st century and Oxford aims to continue to be at the forefront of this innovation. A central objective is the development of improved online hot spot maps linked to the data that defines them. These will reveal hot spots at all scales including small hot spots in otherwise ‘cold’ regions, which are generally neglected by conservation agencies. Conversely this will also identify extensive ‘cold spots’ in hot spot regions, which might be highlighted as places more suitable for sustainable forest use and economic development. The aim will be not always to say protect this, protect that, but rather to recommend protect this, use that.
PCR members can support the programme and sign up to receive online statements at www.priorityclub.com/conservation.
Corporate responsibility is central to IHG’s business strategy and the hotel group’s two major priorities are to support local economies and to work towards making a night with IHG more carbon efficient. In 2009 it launched Green Engage, an online tool to help IHG hotels manage their impact on the environment and recommend ways to build and operate more responsible hotels. To date almost 800 hotels have signed up to Green Engage and through the system the average hotel can save up to 25 per cent on its energy costs and deliver significant environmental benefits.
Thanks again for switching and GO GREEN!!!
Fred McSeveney
