The 2008 Condé Nast Traveler World Savers Congress held on September 23, 2008 in New York City, brought together leading figures involved in sustainable development and poverty eradication such as Jeffrey Sachs, Ashley Judd, and Queen Rania Al Abdullah, as well as travel industry leaders from companies including Four Seasons, Disney Cruise Line, Sandals Resorts International, and Vail Resorts. Here is Editor in Chief Klara Glowczewska's opening remarks.

Good Morning!

It's great to see you all here. Welcome! This is our second Condé Nast Traveler World Savers Congress, but already it feels like a cornerstone.

For those of you who weren't here last year, a bit of background: This magazine was started 21 years ago this month. It was founded on one basic principle: "Truth in Travel, which meant no freebies, no press trips—total editorial independence. We would report on the world as we saw it, the good and the bad. Sure, we'd celebrate how great travel could be, but we really felt we also owed our audience a deeper editorial engagement with the world.

And the world, of course, is a complicated place. Hard journalism has always been part of what we do, as have issues relating to the stewardship of the planet. We've been giving out an environmental award for 19 years now (you'll meet this year's winner later this morning). We have long recognized environmentally responsible travel companies in what for the past 14 years were called the ecotourism awards.

As a magazine, we are not new to what has now become the very high-profile issue of social responsibility. But about two years ago, we started to feel that the time had come to take things to another level. There were two reasons for this: One, because the travel industry had changed, and two, because the world itself had changed--or at least our understanding of it.

First, the travel industry. The economic news in the U.S. is certainly bleak right now, but considered globally, and in the long term, the travel business is booming. At the magazine, it's all we can do to keep up with the new hotels, resorts, cruise lines. The airline industry is struggling right now, but the fact is, more and more people everywhere are flying, and the amount of money being spent on travel globally is increasing at an almost unimaginable rate.

In 2008, world travel is expected to generate close to $8 trillion. That figure is going to rise over the next ten years to approximately $15 trillion. In 2005, 704 million people traveled by air. By 2025—only fourteen years from now—that number is projected to nearly triple, reaching 1,950 million, or nearly two billion people.

These are astonishing numbers. They suggest many things—good, bad, and even ugly—but they prove beyond a doubt the collective power of your industry. What you do and don't do has an enormous impact, actual and potential. You affect, and will continue to increasingly affect, both the earth's environment and the lives of people in the communities where you do business.

But while the tourism economy is massive... This is an increasingly fragile globe. And it's fragile in all kinds of ways; ways which perhaps weren't totally clear to most of us even a few years ago. We now understand that climate change will spare no one—certainly not our children.

But we can't talk just about environmental threats. There are also catastrophes of poverty and health, of religious and ethnic conflict, of failing educational systems. We are about to send tourists into space at $200,000 a pop, and top-end hotels these days easily set you back $1,000 a night.