Sustainable Tourism Futures

Perspectives on Systems, Restructuring and Innovations

Stefan Gössling,C. Michael Hall,David Weaver

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2009
• ISBN:
  9781135843236
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Business
• Categoría: Hospitality, Travel & Tourism Industry

A global industry and an important tool for economic development, international tourism is facing an increasingly uncertain future. Global environmental change, including climate change; increasing fuel prices; and growing criticism from environmental and social interest groups are posing substantial challenges to the belief that international tourism can be sustainable at current rates and patterns of growth. This book therefore aims to answer the questions of if and how tourism can be a sustainable industry. The book concludes that sustainable tourism is possible but that it requires fundamental shifts in operations, systems and philosophies. The various contributions identify a number of means by which this can be accomplished but stress that sustainable tourism still has a long way to travel before it can reach its destination.

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Sustainable Tourism Futures

Perspectives on Systems, Restructuring and Innovations

Stefan Gössling, C. Michael Hall, and David B. Weaver

TOURISM AND SUSTAINABILITY: KEY ISSUES

Although often thought of as a recent phenomenon, the concept of sustainable development has been part of the resource conservation and management debate for almost one hundred and fifty years. George Perkins Marsh’s book Man and Nature Or, Physical Geography as Modified by Human Action (1965), originally published in 1864, had enormous impact on conservation debates, and the questions that Marsh poses as to what is the best economic use of our natural resources still reverberates in debates with respect to sustainable development to the present day.

The concept of sustained yield had become well established in forest conservation practices by the early part of the twentieth century including the setting aside of land for timber and other forest values such as recreation (Nash 1968). However, the concept arguably become part of broader concerns over the carrying capacity of land for human use from the late 1950s on, with issues of biophysical and social carrying capacity becoming a significant focus for tourism research as a result of the influence of outdoor recreation studies (Mitchell 1989). Moreover, at the global scale the concept of carrying capacity also became a significant part of individual studies of the resource limits to economic growth at a global scale (e.g., Meadows et al. 1972), that were extremely influential in the development of the UN biosphere and habitat programmes that are the intellectual and administrative antecedents for the current UN programmes on sustainable development.

The concept of sustainability first came to public attention with the publication of the World Conservation Strategy (WCS) in March, 1980 (IUCN 1980). The WCS was prepared by the International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources (IUCN) with the assistance of the United Nations Environment Education Programme (UNEP) the World Wildlife Fund (WWF), the Food and Agricultural Organisation of the United Nations (FAO) and the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO). The WCS was a strategy for the conservation of the earth’s biological resources in the face of international environmental problems such as deforestation, desertification, ecosystem degradation and destruction, species extinction and loss of genetic diversity, loss of cropland, pollution, and soil erosion.

The WCS defined conservation as ‘the management of human use of the biosphere so that it may yield the greatest sustainable benefit to present generations while maintaining its potential to meet the needs and aspirations of future generations’ (IUCN 1980, s.1.6). The WCS is important in historical terms because it highlighted the global nature of environmental problems, emphasised the significance of the environmental–economic development relationship in the relationship between the developed and less developed countries (the north–south debate), and provided a basis for some government and private sector response, albeit limited, to the problems and issues identified in the report (Hall and Lew 1998). The WCS was also significant in that it represented the halfway mark between the 1972 United Nations Stockholm Conference on the Human Environment (which established the UNEP) and the 1992 UN Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED) in Rio de Janeiro (usually referred to as ‘the Rio Summit’). However, it should be noted that tourism only received extremely limited coverage in the WCS.

In addition to assisting in the development and promotion of the WCS, the UNEP promoted the idea of the creation of a World Commission on Environment and Development (WCED) at its ten-year review conference in 1982. In 1983 an independent commission reporting directly to the United Nations Assembly was established with Gro Harlem Brundtland, then Parliamentary Leader of the Norwegian Labour Party appointed as its chair. Although the term sustainability was also used in a 1981 book by Lester Brown of the Worldwatch Institute, Building a Sustainable Society, by Myers and Gaia Ltd. (1984) and Clark and Munn (1986), Ecologically Sustainable Development of the Biosphere, it was the publication of the report of the WCED in 1987 entitled Our Common Future, commonly referred to as the Brundtland report that the term ‘sustainable development’ became popularised. According to the WCED (1987, 43) sustainable development is development which ‘meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs’. However, although the concept of sustainable development has been incredibly influential in tourism research, it is notable that tourism was only briefly mentioned in the Brundtland report.

Although formal interest in sustainability on the part of the tourism industry and tourism academics dates from the late 1980s, earlier developments in the sector were critical in setting the stage for this involvement. The decades following World War II, specifically, were characterised by a virtually uncritical embrace of mass tourism, representing what Jafari (1989, 2001) has described as the ‘advocacy platform’. Inevitably, market-driven expansion fostered ecological, sociocultural, and economic problems in many locations, and within the sea-sand-sun destinations of the Third World pleasure periphery in particular (Turner and Ash 1975). Various ‘cautionary platform’ advocates chronicled the perils of unregulated mass tourism, culminating in Butler’s (1980) well known destination life cycle model, which suggested laissez-faire tourism’s tendency under conditions of sustained demand to expand beyond the carrying capacities of individual destinations.

During the early 1980s, small-scale, locally controlled modes of ‘alternative tourism’ (that is, alternative to mass tourism) were proffered as being more adapted to the needs and conditions of most destinations. However, the limitations of this ‘adaptancy platform’ quickly became apparent in the realisation that such limited forms of tourism activity could never substitute for, or replace, the established mass tourism industry that was by then implicating hundreds of millions of tourist trips per year. Many developing countries and communities, moreover, were still compelled by the prospect of large-scale tourism activity generating development-inducing inputs of revenue and employment. The idea that a destination could have mass tourism and positive economic, sociocultural, and ecological outcomes was stimulated by Brundtland’s popularisation of ‘sustainable development’ in the late 1980s (WCED 1987). Building on the momentum that this concept generated in broad-based fora such as the 1992 Rio Earth Summit, ‘sustainable tourism’ quickly emerged as both a principle and objective of tourism organisations, businesses, and academics. Its subsequent institutionalisation at the highest levels is evidenced by the establishment of a dedicated sustainable tourism entity within the UNWTO, and also within the private sector by the World Travel and Tourism Council’s Blueprint for New Tourism document (WTTC 2003), although the latter makes no mention of the potential implications of climate change. During the early 2000s, additional momentum for this institutional embrace has been provided by growing concern about global climate change and its substantial apparent linkages with tourism systems.

The embrace of sustainable tourism is a core premise of the ‘knowledge-based platform’, which Jafari (1989, 2001) additionally characterises as a less ideologically constrained scientific approach that regards both mass and alternative tourism as legitimate and beneficial models of tourism development, depending on the local circumstances, background research, and management/planning considerations that pertain to any given destination. Yet, although something approaching consensus has been attained with respect to the basic principle of sustainable tourism, implementation in an era of climate change concern is a far more confounding matter, reflecting sustainable development’s status as an ‘essentially contested concept’ susceptible to multiple interpretations depending on the ‘values and ideologies of various stakeholders’ (Hall 1998, 13). ‘Sustainable tourism’, as such, can be equated with virtually any type of activity, the term at times being cynically employed to gain added ethical standing leading to what is sometimes referred to as ‘greenwash’. On the other hand, Hunter (1997) and others regard this flexibility (or malleability?) as a strength which recognises that its implementation in a densely urban environment such as Hong Kong or the Gold Coast of Australia must be predicated on entirely different assumptions from those which pertain to wilderness settings such as Antarctica or northern Siberia.

The dilemma of flexibility permeates to all aspects of implementation, including the selection and weighting of relevant indicators as well as the identification of appropriate monitoring protocols, thresholds, and benchmarks for these indicators. Such challenges are evident in many of the case studies described in this book, as are the inherent complexities of tourism systems, which are characterised by fuzzy boundaries and often unclear or unanticipated indirect and induced impacts that arise from unpredictable cause and effect relationships (Weaver 2006). Should, for example, a hotel which is internally stellar in terms of its operational sustainability still be regarded as ‘sustainable’ if management does not mitigate the carbon emissions generated by its guests, or if substantial habitat clearance results from the nearby settlement of new employees and their families? Ultimately, the issue of sustainable tourism is moot if the external systems which interact with tourism are unsustainable or otherwise inimical to sustainable outcomes. The devastating tsunami of 2004 is but one dramatic illustration of this imperative of inter-dependency, though less dramatic but more pervasive practices such as dynamite and cyanide fishing may be just as harmful to the ideal of sustainable tourism in the long term. Also daunting are escalating costs of energy and other inputs, which on one hand might stimulate the pursuit of cost-saving measures such as energy conservation and recycling, but on the other hand might dissuade tourism authorities and businesses from addressing long-term concerns just as or more important for the attainment of long-term sustainability goals.

TOURISM AND CLIMATE CHANGE

One of the most relevant, if not the single most relevant issue for environmentally sustainable tourism is climate change, both because tourism is affected by climate change and because the sector is a considerable force of climate change (Hall and Higham 2005; Gössling and Hall 2006; Becken and Hay 2007; UNWTO-UNEP-WMO 2008). According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (2007), temperature increases due to growing concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere will lead to globally averaged surface temperature rises by 1.8–4.0ºC by the end of the twenty-first century. Changes in temperatures and other climate parameters will not be linear, rather they will be accompanied by heat waves, heavy precipitation events, or storms. Decreases in snow cover are expected to continue. These are but some examples of the consequences of global climate and environmental change for tourism (for the most recent and comprehensive review see UNWTO-UNEP-WMO 2008).

Tourism is itself an important contributor to emissions, as shown in various studies (e.g., Becken 2002; Gössling 2002; Gössling and Hall 2...