Year in Review - Annual Report 2025

Report

GDS-Index 2025 Results Announced

GDS-Index benchmarks sustainability in 81 destinations worldwide - Nordic cities maintain leadership in global rankings.The Global Destination Sustainability Movement (GDS-Movement) has released the results of the 2025 Global Destination Sustainability Index (GDS-Index), the world’s leading benchmarking program for destination-level sustainability performance. Now in its 10th year, the GDS-Index evaluated 81 cities across four key areas of sustainability, recognizing top-performing destinations and tracking year-over-year progress.Helsinki, Finland, claimed the top spot with a score of 93.5%, earning the prestigious Leadership Award. It was followed closely by Gothenburg, Sweden (91.5%) and Copenhagen, Denmark (88.8%), reinforcing the Nordic region’s continued excellence in destination sustainability.Sapporo achieved a score of 69.5% (improving by 4.5 points from 2024), making it our 10th submittion since the GDS-Index launch in 2016 (with only 35 destinations back then).The GDS-Index evaluates destinations against a comprehensive and updated set of more than 70 qualitative and quantitative criteria across four key areas: the city's environmental strategy and infrastructure, social sustainability performance, suppliers’ performance, and the strategy and initiatives of the destination management organization.The 2025 edition marks a decade of the GDS-Index’s impact, driving measurable progress in sustainability practices across cities worldwide.