Need to Know
08 : 09 : 23

Bleisure, the pandemic-boosted lifestyle shift combining business and leisure travel, has grown in popularity due to businesses maintaining flexible working policies. The Bleisure tourism industry accounts for almost 33% of the global business travel market, with innovations spanning hotels, co-working spaces and more (source: Future Market Insights). This great merging has unlocked new ways of splitting work and leisure, from which emerges a new lifestyle typology that The Future Laboratory has dubbed the Promad: purposeful, progressive and proactive nomad.

Watch Chris Sanderson, co-founder of The Future Laboratory, offer a brief overview of the trend, and learn more about how the Bleisure category will undergo further radical changes as consumers use the opportunity to extend their stays.

US – Having financial resources doesn’t equate to greater climate responsibility. Researchers led by the University of Massachusetts Amherst conducted a study of income-based contributions to the total greenhouse gas emissions in the US that reveals the disproportionate footprint of high-net-worth individuals (HNWIs).

The research found that not only can 40% of emissions be traced back to the income flows of the top 10% in the US, but the top 1% of earners alone generate 15–17% of the nation's emissions. Jared Starr, a sustainability scientist at UMass Amherst and the lead author of the new study, suggests that rather than taxing consumables, income- and shareholder-based taxation could effectively drive change. ‘In this way we could incentivise the Americans who are driving and profiting the most from climate change to decarbonise their industries and investments,’ he says. ‘It’s divestment through self-interest, rather than altruism.’

These findings show why HNWIs are adopting low-key and inconspicuous behaviours, what we call Uneasy Affluence, amid rising ‘eat the rich’ ideologies and social tensions that stem from ever-growing disparities in wealth and privilege.