Sustainable Tourism Policy Frameworks

Having looked at the external and internal challenges facing the move towards more sustainable tourism, and the impacts of tourism, you should now be wondering how sustainability in tourism can be turned into more than an ideal. Perhaps one of the most obvious way to achieve this is simply to regulate the sector. After all regulation worked for the ozone layer: scientists raised the alarm in the 1970s that a hole was appearing in the atmosphere’s ozone layer, caused by Ozone Depleting Substances or ODS (most notably CFCs) and resulting in adverse effects on human health and the environment. By 1987 the Montreal Protocol was established to phase out the use of ODS, and by June 2015, all countries in the United Nations, the Cook Islands, Holy See, Niue and the supranational European Union had ratified the original Protocol. The result was a 98% drop in ODS since ratification, and the hole is expected to have fully repaired itself by 2050. A significant achievement in terms of international cooperation, based on scientific advice.

Introduction

Sustainability is often represented as resting on the three founding pillars of social, environmental and economic sustainability (people, planet and profit) – a firm, immovable foundation, upon which all else rests. Build these correctly at the start and the rest will follow, freeing you up to focus on the day to day running of operations.

Challenges to Implementing Sustainability Practices in Tourism

So has sustainability in tourism actually reached a point of stagnation? The answer on the surface may well be ‘yes’ . At first glance, it would appear that tourism has moved little beyond flight carbon offset schemes, high efficiency lightbulbs, and towel re-use schemes. The cynics would also point to ‘greenwashing’ within tourism, talking up environmental benefits to give the appearance of greater sustainability than is actually occurring. Why would this be? The inclusion of sustainability-related behaviours within a business (green-washing or otherwise) tends to happen for one or several of three reasons. (1) To ward off the imposition of tighter government regulation on tourism activities (2) To tap into this apparently growing market of green consumers, who seek out environmentally and socially sustainable products and services (3) To enhance the social licence of businesses operating in sensitive areas (cruise ships travelling to the highly sensitive Antarctic environment, for example).

Concluding Remarks

I hope that by now you can see that ‘sustainability’, a deceptively simple word, is a journey itself. The guiding principles of sustainability are to strategically plan using a holistic and adaptive approach; preserve essential ecological processes as well as protect human heritage and biodiversity; develop in a way that sustains productivity over the long-term for all generations; and achieve a better balance of fairness and opportunity between nations. No small task and one that defies our current business-as-usual approach. According to the UNWTO, the end goal for sustainable tourism as a sector is to “take full account of its current and future economic, social and environmental impacts, addressing the needs of visitors, the industry, the environment and host communities”. It’s a constant process of measuring your impacts, adjusting your practices, working with stakeholders and supply chains, keeping abreast of sustainability-oriented innovations, and scanning your social, technological, environmental, economic and political environments to be able to manage the changes that are inevitably coming your way. In this way, we move from linear thinking to a more systems-based approach that sees tourism as part of a wider, complex whole.

Operationalising Sustainable Tourism

As well as simply (!) learning to keep the three sustainability balls in the air, it’s important to know how to juggle these balls in a coherent and pleasing manner – after all tourism is part of the experience economy and we want to deliver something that is engaging and attractive to its end users, tourists. This chapter therefore discusses how to operationalise sustainability in tourism. Some have tried to do this at the level of a destination, creating the ‘Green Destinations’ brand (Figure 8.1). It’s a laudable effort and one which hopefully will lead to greater sustainability for the sector as a whole in the long run. Given what we know about the complexity of the tourism system, creating a green destination is, however, perhaps outside the scope of this book, and of most of us as practitioners or tourism business managers.

Ethics and Values

Ethical concerns underpin the sector of sustainable tourism. Ethics is what allows us to make decisions about daily interactions with others and the world around us – it is fundamental to constructing the types of sustainable relationships that we have already discussed in Chapter 1. At its most basic level ethics distinguishes right from wrong. Its place in sustainable tourism is so important that an ethics-based platform has been suggested as an extension of the advocacy à cautionary à adaptancy à knowledge-based platforms that we reviewed in Chapter 1. Macbeth (2005) calls for a sixth platform in tourism studies, an ethics platform – he places this even after a fifth sustainability platform. An ethics platform provides us with the moral compass to make decisions about all our travel-related decisions, especially the hard ones that we don’t like to think about.

Measures and Tools

The old adage says that “you can only manage what you can measure”. Yet, it is also perhaps true that in the tourism space, where the public and private domains collide, perhaps a little more imagination is required, and sustainable tourism management tools may be required to cover the intangible aspects of tourism as well as the more tangible aspects. This is because the public domain, as highlighted in Chapter 2, holds places and spaces in the public trust – the places and spaces that we share with family and friends, that recharge and rejuvenate, that hold aesthetic, recreational, functional and emotional values for us, as residents of those spaces and places. Meanwhile, the private sector sees those same places and spaces as opportunities to generate a return on investment, often transforming them into economically productive areas through processes of urban regeneration or concessions on public land.

Change and Innovation

By its very definition sustainable tourism is a both a current- and a future-oriented activity; it’s tourism “that takes full account of its current and future economic, social and environmental impacts, addressing the needs of visitors, the industry, the environment and host communities” according to the UNWTO. Understanding sustainable tourism and managing therefore has a very strong future-oriented component, which is the focus of this chapter. Often, when we want to understand the future, one of the first things that we need to do is look to the past to identify the trends that have got us to where we are now, and that, in all likelihood, will continue to be trends into the future. The context for tourism’s future is a history of spectacular and sustained growth, measured in terms of volume, geographic spread, economic benefits, as well as environmental and social impacts. Going back 40 years to the 1970s, tourism has grown from under 70 million international tourist arrivals, to over 1 billion international tourist arrivals in 2012, according to UNWTO estimates.

Impacts of tourism

An impact is considered to be the change in a given state over time, resulting from an external stimulus. It is important to distinguish internal and external stimuli: a change in state from internal drivers, e.g. the maturing of an ecosystem and the successional changes in species (e.g. from grasses to trees) as a result, would not be considered an impact, under that definition. To best understand the impacts of tourism, it is easiest to examine economic, social and environmental impacts as separate categories from each other. The caveat here, is that the boundaries between categories are generally fuzzier in any given tourism context. As we become better at understanding tourism impacts, we will start to see relationships between social, environmental and economic impacts. Becken, S., Garofano, N., McLennan, C.L., Moore, S., Rajan, R. & Watt, M. (2014). From Challenges to Solutions 2nd White Paper on Tourism and Water: Providing the business case. Griffith Institute for Tourism Research Report Series Report No 1 March 2014

Governance and Partnerships

The previous chapter addressed frameworks and regulations that support the move towards sustainable tourism. On their own however, these are not enough. First, they need ‘buy-in’ from the people who will be affected by them, the stakeholders on the ground. Second, they may not always be fully supported by politicians and governors, who can overturn policies at different opportunities. We don’t need to think any further than US President Trump making a shock statement on June 1 2017 that his country would withdraw from the Paris Agreement, jeopardising the whole process, as the US is one of the largest producers of GHG emissions.