Making Tourism More Sustainable
By 2004 most tourism ministries and much of the industry was aware of the strong relationship between tourism and sustainable development – using this activity to deliver environmental and social benefits as well as economic ones. However, the full extent of the ‘sustainable tourism’ agenda was not always recognised and policy instruments to use were not seen as a set. To address this situation the United Nations Environment Programme and the World Tourism Organization commissioned The Tourism Company to produce a comprehensive guide for policy makers Making Tourism More Sustainable.
The resulting guide presents 12 Aims for Sustainable Tourism. It then shows how these can be integrated into policy, through looking at structures and strategies for working together, and addressing certain key choices, such as taking sustainability into account in selecting target markets. A large part of the report describes the various tools that can be used to influence tourism development and management – from planning control to economic instruments, voluntary certification and codes of conduct.
This was a significant undertaking for us. Throughout the report we tried to keep the recommendations very practical, drawing on lessons from 10 case studies (from Scotland to New Zealand and Costa Rica to South Africa) and many technical examples.
We have been actively involved in presenting the output at meetings all over the world, and are pleased that UNWTO and UNEP have continued to base much of their own work on what we set out here.
