Sustainable tourism, one that establishes a suitable balance between the environmental, economic and socio-cultural aspects of tourism development, plays an important role in conserving biodiversity. It attempts to minimize its impact on the environment and local culture so that it will be available for future generations, while contributing to generating income, employment and the conservation of local ecosystems.
By doing so, sustainable tourism maximizes the positive contribution of tourism to biodiversity conservation and thus to poverty reduction and the achievement of common goals towards sustainable development.
Sustainable tourism provides crucial economic incentives for habitat protection. Revenues from visitor spending are often channeled back into nature conservation or capacity building programmes for local communities to manage protected areas. Furthermore, tourism can be a key vehicle in raising awareness and fostering positive behaviour change for biodiversity conservation among the millions of people travelling the globe every year.
Thus, sustainable tourism should:
1) Make optimal use of environmental resources that constitute a key element in tourism development, maintaining essential ecological processes and helping to conserve natural heritage and biodiversity.
2) Respect the socio-cultural authenticity of host communities, conserve their built and living cultural heritage and traditional values, and contribute to inter-cultural understanding and tolerance.
3) Ensure viable, long-term economic operations, providing socio-economic benefits to all stakeholders that are fairly distributed, including stable employment, income-earning opportunities, social services to host communities and contributing to poverty alleviation.
Sustainable tourism development requires the informed participation of all relevant stakeholders, as well as strong political leadership to ensure wide participation and consensus building. Achieving sustainable tourism is a continuous process and it requires constant monitoring of impacts, introducing the necessary preventive and/or corrective measures whenever necessary.
Sustainable tourism should also maintain a high level of tourist satisfaction and ensure a meaningful experience to the tourists, raising their awareness about sustainability issues and promoting sustainable tourism practices amongst them.
The twelve main goals for sustainable tourism laid out in 2005 by the World Tourism Organization and the United Nations Environment Program are as follows:
- Economic Viability: To ensure the viability and competitiveness of tourism destinations and enterprises, so that they are able to continue to prosper and deliver benefits in the long term.
- Local Prosperity: To maximize the contribution of tourism to the economic prosperity of the host destination, including the proportion of visitor spending that is retained locally.
- Employment Quality: To strengthen the number and quality of local jobs created and supported by tourism, including the level of pay, conditions of service and availability to all without discrimination by gender, race, disability or in other ways.
- Social Equity: To seek a widespread and fair distribution of economic and social benefits from tourism throughout the recipient community, including improving opportunities, income and services available to the poor.
- Visitor Fulfillment: To provide a safe, satisfying and fulfilling experience for visitors, available to all without discrimination by gender, race, disability or in other ways.
- Local Control: To engage and empower local communities in planning and decision making about the management and future development of tourism in their area, in consultation with other stakeholders.
- Community Wellbeing: To maintain and strengthen the quality of life in local communities, including social structures and access to resources, amenities and life support systems, avoiding any form of social degradation or exploitation
- Cultural Richness: To respect and enhance the historic heritage, authentic culture, traditions and distinctiveness of host communities
- Physical Integrity: To maintain and enhance the quality of landscapes, both urban and rural, and avoid the physical and visual degradation of the environment
- Biological Diversity: To support the conservation of natural areas, habitats and wildlife, and minimize damage to them
- Resource Efficiency: To minimize the use of scarce and non-renewable resources in the development and operation of tourism facilities and services
- Environmental Purity: To minimize the pollution of air, water and land and the generation of waste by tourism enterprises and visitors.
Why is sustainable tourism important?
On one hand, tourism wields tremendous economic positive outcomes: it is one of the world’s most significant sources of economic outcomes and employment. However, tourism is a very complex industry involving numerous stakeholders (sometimes with opposite interests) and requiring a significant amount of resources. As such, tourism can have very opposite effects according to the way activities are managed. Managed well, tourism can play a positive role in the socio, cultural, economical, environmental and political development of the destination and as such represents a significant development opportunity for many countries and communities. On the contrary, unchecked tourism development can lead to very damageable impacts on natural resources, consumption patterns, pollution and social systems. The need for sustainable planning and management is imperative for the industry to survive as a whole.
Impact
Environmental Impacts
The quality of the environment, both natural and man-made, is essential to tourism. However, tourism’s relationship with the environment is complex. It involves many activities that can have adverse environmental effects. Many of these impacts are linked with the construction of general infrastructure such as roads and airports, and of tourism facilities, including resorts, hotels, restaurants, shops, golf courses and marinas. The negative impacts of tourism development can gradually destroy the environmental resources on which it depends.
On the other hand, tourism has the potential to create beneficial effects on the environment by contributing to environmental protection and conservation. It is a way to raise awareness of environmental values and it can serve as a tool to finance protection of natural areas and increase their economic importance.
Tourism development can put enormous pressure on an area and lead to impacts such as soil erosion, increased pollution, discharges into the sea, natural habitat loss, increased pressure on endangered species and heightened vulnerability to forest fires. It often puts a strain on water resources, and it can force local populations to compete for the use of critical resources.
Socio-Cultural Impacts
The socio-cultural impacts of tourism described here are the effects on host communities of direct and indirect relations with tourists and of interaction with the tourism industry. For a variety of reasons, host communities often are the weaker party in interactions with their guests and service providers, leveraging any influence they might have. These influences are not always apparent, as they are difficult to measure, depend on value judgments and are often indirect or hard to identify.
The impacts arise when tourism brings about changes in value systems and behaviour and thereby threatens indigenous identity. Furthermore, changes often occur in community structure, family relationships, collective traditional lifestyles, ceremonies and morality. But tourism can also generate positive impacts as it can serve as a supportive force for peace, foster pride in cultural traditions and help avoid urban relocation by creating local jobs. As often happens when different cultures meet, socio-cultural impacts are ambiguous: the same objectively described impacts are seen as beneficial by some groups, and are perceived as negative – or as having negative aspects – by other stakeholders.
Economic Impacts of Tourism
The tourism industry generates substantial economic benefits to both host countries and tourists’ home countries. Especially in developing countries, one of the primary motivations for a region to promote itself as a tourism destination is the expected economic improvement.
As with other impacts, this massive economic development brings along both positive and negative consequences.
Sustainable tourism is defined by the World Tourism Organisation as responsible tourism; tourism that respects the needs of the environment and the people who live there, as well as the local economy and visitors.
Sustainable tourism is based on four pillars of development:
- Economic: to ensure that tourism destinations and businesses are competitive so that they can thrive and deliver long-term benefits;
- Environmental: reducing air, water and land pollution, reducing waste, enhancing the quality and character of the landscape, and protecting and conserving nature, plants and animals;
- Socio-cultural: to improve the quality of life in local communities, to enhance and respect cultural and historical heritage, the diversity of tourist destinations and traditions;
- Climate: to reduce the impact of tourism on the climate and to increase the adaptation of tourism to climate change.
To ensure long-term sustainability, we must strive to strike the right balance between all pillars. We need to be aware that competitive tourism will be tourism that is based on economic success while being respectful of the natural, cultural and social environment.
Benefits and valuesÂ
The benefits of sustainable management are:
- Financial savings for businesses and tourist destinations, which reduce costs through energy efficiency and the use of renewable energy sources;
- Increased attractiveness of sustainable businesses to investors;
- Better preparedness of sustainable businesses to changes in environmental legislation, environmentally certified providers have an advantage in tenders for co-funding;
- Tourism providers and destinations with a sustainable approach develop a higher quality product and strive for a higher quality guest experience;
- Companies that are increasingly concerned about the natural and social environment and employee satisfaction are better able to motivate employees and retain quality staff;
- Tourism businesses that have developed sustainable practices and verified them through environmental schemes achieve higher visibility and reputation.