Public and Private Sustainable Tourism: Environmental Footprints and Quality of Life

'Sustainable development' has been a popular conceptual framework since the World Commission on Environment and Development issued its report to the United Nations in 1987 (WCED, 1987).  Also known as the “Brundtland Report”, after the commission’s chairperson, Gro Harlmen Bundtland of Norway, its goal was to define a new approach to addressing pressing social and environmental needs of the world.  Among its chief concerns were

• 1.  Poverty (hunger, health, housing, wealth distribution, exposure to natural disasters
• 2. Growth (fossil fuel and other natural resource consumption and pollution), global agenda to deal with the deterioration of natural and social environments. 

Today, 24 years later, sustainable development and sustainable tourism are widely accepted as appropriate philosophies upon which to base policy decisions and behavioral practice. Their wide acceptance is due, in part, to the flexibility used to interpret their meaning.  “Sustainable development” is an oxymoron, in that it implies both environmental conservation and stewardship (through sustainability), and natural resource exploitation (or development). Proponents for both of these perspectives commonly use “sustainable development” to argue for their respective positions. For Destination marketing organizations (DMOs), for example, sustainable development often means maintaining and growing tourist expenditures and tourism investments. This may be in complete opposition to slow growth conservationists for whom sustainable tourism is tourism development that does not impact local natural environments traditional cultures.

Sustainable tourism, however, mostly applies to mostly amenity rich geographic settings and, as such, is a niche area of application for the broader sustainable development paradigm. Urbanization, as a primary force for global social transformation can provide a more general and perhaps universal perspective on sustainable development. Several efforts have been made in popular media, for example, to rate the sustainability of cities, along with justifications for those ratings. A compilation of several of those lists shows a dominance of European cities, followed by North America and then a few cities in other parts of the world (table 1, sources: d'Estries, 2011; Grist, 2007; Linssen & Sindik, 2008).

What is more valuable for these sustainable cities lists is the criteria that they are based on. A review of the sources for table 1 resulted to two general types of criteria against which these cities stood out in various ways: their environmental footprint and their quality of life (table 2) (see also, . The environmental footprint of cities includes technological investments and innovations that either reduce greenhouse gas emissions or, secondarily, enhance the recycling of natural resources. As such, they are efforts to reduce the environmental impact of cities, with ultimate goals of reducing or mitigating the worldwide severity of global warming and environmental change. Quality of life criteria, on the other hand, are much less narrowly focused on global environmental issues. Instead, they address local lived experiences and the creation of places that are comfortably adapted to their social and environmental geographies. Open space, park lands, air, water, transportation systems, forests and heritage sites are shared, common resources that require conservation for future generations as much as the fossil fuels and other non-renewable resources. 

The sustainable cities criteria in Table 2 reflect the perspective of environmental organizations that are the strongest supporters of sustainable development, which reflects a strong bias toward the conservation of natural and social resources.  It also shows a bifurcation in that perspective between mitigation, which is a mostly engineering challenge, and adaptation, which is a more difficult social planning challenge.

The difference in these two perspectives is also evident in the area of sustainable tourism. The most common approach to instituting and verifying sustainable tourism is through engineering evaluations of the environmental footprint of a hotel, resort or tourist attraction that result in green certifications. This approach to sustainable tourism is popular because it is easier to conceptualize and more readily measurable than are social planning objectives. Tourism industry sectors throughout the world have adopted green certification programs both to mitigate the environmental impacts of tourism activities and as an effective marketing mechanism for some travel segments.

How tourism activities impacts local quality of life is occasionally acknowledged by the tourism industry, which mostly associates this through contribution to employment creation and the conservation of traditional culture through artistic displays and performances, and various forms of museumization.  Tourism’s broader roles in community development are addressed more by non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and social scientists than by private sector tourism industry representatives.

The distinction in tourism development between private businesses ownership of environmental mitigation measures and public sector and civil society responsibility for public goods is not exclusive. Governments also build green buildings and adopt internal energy efficiency and recycling practices to reduce their environmental footprint.  In doing so, however, they are behaving more like private sector entities, rather than setting public policies that influence broad sectors of community behavior. The true distinction here is the public goods nature of the resources that comprise most of the quality of life sustainability criteria. The profit driven private sector is seldom, if ever, given primary responsibility for ensuring a community’s water and air quality, and shared open spaces.

After two and a half decades of sustainable development, this is where we have arrived the sustainable development paradigm has brought us.  There is a private sector primary focus on the technology of climate and ecosystem mitigations, and there is a public sector dominance of the realm of quality of life. These are both positive experiences that have benefitted the communities by reducing environmental impacts (footprints) and creating more livable places where they have been adopted.

The problem is that although sustainability paradigm practices have been adopted throughout the world to a degree beyond the expectations of many, they have not resulted in effective responses to global climate change and widespread poverty and hunger.  Some have even argued that the success of sustainability has resulted in a depoliticized and coopted climate change concerns, resulting in post-modern indifference to the future (Swyngedouw, 2013; Beck, 2010).  

The solution? See my previous post on Creative Resilience for the direction that I am currently leaning towards...

References Cited

Beck, UY. (2010) Climate for Change, or How to Create a Green Modernity. Theory, Culture & Society 27: 254-266.

d'Estries, M. (2011) Top Five Most Sustainable Cities in the World. Ecomagination.com (29 Nov), online at http://www.ecomagination.com/top-five-most-sustainable-cities-in-the-world, accessed 20 January 2013.

Grist (2007) 15 Green Cities. Grist (20 July), online at: http://grist.org/article/cities3/, accessed 20 Jan 2013.

Linssen, S. and Christopher Sindik, C. (2008) 2020 Global Sustainability Centers, Ethisphere (7 Sept), online at http://ethisphere.com/2020-global-sustainability-centers/, accessed 20 January 2013.

Swyngedouw, E. (2013) The Non-political Politics of Climate Change. ACME: An International E-Journal for Critical Geographies 12(1): 1-8, online at http://www.acme-journal.org/vol12/Swingedouw2013.pdf, accessed 13 January 2013.

Creative Resilience: The Next Sustainability for Tourism?

by Alan A. Lew – this is a brief summary of a paper that I am working on

'Sustainable development' has really only been around as a popular conceptual framework since the World Commission on Environment and Development (WCED) issued its report to the United Nations in 1987 (Hall & Lew, 2009).  Also known as the Brundtland Report, its goal was to define a global agenda to deal with the deterioration of natural and social environments. 

Today, 24 years later, sustainable development and sustainable tourism are widely accepted as appropriate philosophies upon which to base policy decisions and behavioral practice. Their wide acceptance is due, in part, to the flexibility used to interpret their meaning.  Unfortunately, that flexibility may have made both sustainable development and sustainable tourism meaningless.

Evidence for the failure of sustainable development is seen in many of the major news headlines of the past couple of years, including:

1. Increasingly extreme climate events related to increasing atmospheric green house gasses (GHG).
2. Increasing global population (reaching seven billion in 2011) putting more pressure on natural resources. 
3. Increasing extreme geologic events (earthquakes and tsunamis), in part due to growing populations in dangerous locations.
4. Economic recession and financial crises, especially in the US, the Eurozone and Japan.

All of these changes, among others, are taking place despite widespread commitments to sustainable development across the globe.  It appears that sustainable development in general, and sustainable tourism as one of its forms, has failed to meet the demands of contemporary society, and are even being overwhelmed by them. 

Resilience theory offers an alternative to the sustainable development paradigm.  Community resilience is the ability of a place to maintain a normal level of service in the face of periodic or unpredictable external shocks or system failures.  One way to think of the difference is that sustainable development tries to prevent the shock event from occurring (by behaving more responsible toward the environment and society), whereas resilience planning focuses more on the response and recovering after the shock event.

From a human settlement of community perspective, three general approaches to resilience planning have been suggested (Davoudi 2012): Engineering, Ecological and Transformational.  Engineering resilience is the ability to return to a normal equilibrium after a disturbance and emphasizes the efficiency and predictability of bouncing back. 

Ecological resilience is the ability to learn from an adverse event so as to be better prepared for future shocks, which may involve an alternative form of normalcy. Such learning includes institutional capacity building and understanding individual social capital opportunities and needs.  For example, the SARS epidemic decimated tourist arrivals in many Asian countries in 2003 because they were caught unprepared to address this type of catastrophe. Similar disease issues have arisen since that time, but policies and practices adopted since 2003 have successfully kept them mostly under control, protecting the tourism industry.  These practices include isolating travelers who are severely ill and regularly disinfecting elevators and other strategic locations in public places.

Engineering and ecological resilience represent the traditional goals of community resilience planning and both assume that there is a normal level of social equilibrium that can be achieved.  Most the new interest in climate change resilience has tends to focus on these traditional approaches. However, as community resilience planning has become more widely examined by social scientists and community planners, a third form of resilience has emerged.  It is define as the capacity of a community to invoke whole systems changes, reflecting different timelines and geographical scales, that evolve and create new adaptive models of response to changes in their natural and social environment (Planning Theory & Practice). I call this Creative resilience because resilient societies are those that are able to continuously re-create themselves to successfully adapt to an ever changing world. 

Three basic tenets of Creative resilience are:

1. Disturbances range from large, sudden shocks to gradual and consistent shifts, from the unpredictable to the expected, and from the undesired to those that are welcome.
2. Communities and people build resilience by continuously responding to disturbances in creative and adaptive ways.
3. Creative capacity building is occurs through effective leadership, individual social capital, and institutional social learning.

To me, a resilience approach makes a lot more sense in today's world, with today's challenges, than does a sustainability approach.  While much of sustainability also supports resiliency, resilience planning is more directly related to the immediate challenges of a community in a real and practical manner.  Creative resilience also offers a wider range of possible responses and visionary futures than does sustainability, which is more narrowly focused on conservation approaches.

For tourism, does this mean that we will replace green certifications (such as Green Globe) with resilient certifications, or at least incorporate resilience into the certification criteria?  I think that we may actually see this some day, though not in the near term as resilience is still an emerging approach.

For tourism destinations, however, the question arises as to what is the more important and effective policy for local and regional funding and political support: sustainability or resilience? Instead of sustainable tourism, should we be promoting resilient tourism?  And what would resilient tourism look like?  

My own fieldwork in Asia indicates that the answer to this last question is very much dependent on the context and needs of the tourism entities involved.  Figure 1 shows how four generalized types of tourism settings based on the degree of disturbance (from gradual shift to sudden shock) and the scale of tourism (from private entrepreneurs to shared public interests) that are involved. 

 Figure 1

The Change Rate axis recognizes that people perceive and manage slow, but still significant, changes in the environment, culture and society than they do with sudden shocks to these systems.  In addition, the model recognizes that rates of change can be highly variable over time and at different social and geographic scales, which can require different modes of response.

Given the complexity of contemporary social challenges, a fully comprehensive approach to resilience planning is best approached from a creative resilience because it is the only approach that acknowledges and accepts the range of changes that a community faces.  From the perspective of the tourism industry, this means:

• 1-      All tourism destinations face a range of change pressures, including environmental (changing natural resources), social (changing cultural resources) and economic (changing economic conditions).
• 2-      Some pressures for change are apparent and predictable, while others are opaque and unpredictable.
• 3-      Pressures for change occur at a variety of time lines (speeds) -- some are slow and gradual, while others require urgent responses.
• 4-      Traditional sustainable tourism planning mostly addresses slow change issues. Engineering resilience planning mostly addresses major disruptions.
• 5-      Pressures for change occur at a variety of geographic scales -- some only impact an individual entrepreneur, while others impact an entire community or cultural group.
• 6-      Lower geographic scale issues need to be incorporated into resilience planning that occurs at higher geographic scales.
• 7-      Common change issues in tourism destinations include the modification, deterioration or complete loss of: (1) tourism facilities and services; (2) environmental and cultural tourism resources; (3) tourist markets; and (4) skilled employees
• 8-      A slow change pressures may be transformed into a sudden shock event if it passes a tolerance threshold (or breaking point).
• 9-      Comprehensive resilience planning should incorporate the full range of change pressures that a community faces, and encourage creative and flexible response.
• 10-   The tourism industry needs to be included in community resilience planning.

Reference Cited

Davoudi, S. (2012) Resilience: A Bridging Concept of a Dead End? Planning Theory & Practice, Vol. 13, No. 2, 299–333, June 2012 - http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14649357.2012.677124 

Hall, C.M. and Lew, A.A. (2009). Understanding and Managing Tourism Impacts: An Integrated Approach. London: Routledge.

The Challenge of Benchmarking Tourism's Global Economic Value

In 2008, I posted on this blog: "Tourism is Not the World's Largest Industry" -- which actually came from my book: Understanding and Managing Tourism Impacts: An Integrated Approach (with C.Michael Hall, 2009, Routledge, UK).  That post has been one of the most visited on my blog.


I see today that the World Travel and Tourism Council (WTTC) has recently commissioned a study to, yet again, prove to policy makers that tourism is a really big deal (see their press release here: Travel and tourism larger industry than automotive manufacturing; and on more on the wttc.org website here - they have a couple of ppt files on their site that details their findings, though as usual, the methodology is fuzzy, at best).

The problem is that the co-called "tourism industry" is so diverse that almost any activity remotely related to travel and hospitality can be considered all or part of it.  The WTTC tends to use the Tourism Satellite Accounting System to "guestimate" how much each sector of an economy contributes to tourism -- and this really is just a guess!  In addition, the Tourism Satellite Accounting System is inherently unsuitable for comparison across political boundaries (beyond a single country) and across different industries.  Each of those transgressions involves exponentially greater guesswork.  Also, comparing service industries to manufacturing is wrought with challenges and is not recommended by the WTO (World Trade Organization), which compiles most of the international trade data for the world.  (I know, I did make this last transgression myself in my original blog post on the topic, but at least I admit that it is a fundamental flaw in my analysis.) 


Anyway ... yes, I fully agree that tourism is a huge global economic activity that just continues to grow despite economic upheavals across the globe.  However, I caution everyone to be careful in accepting the illusion of hard number results from any study that tries to compare tourism economic activities with other industries at a global or even regional scale. 


(Cross-posted at BlogNotions.com)