SUBJECT: Sustainable tourism
AUTHOR: Eugenio Yunis, Sustainable Development of Tourism Department, World Tourism Organization

SUMMARY: When planned and managed in a sustainable manner, tourism is one of the few sectors that ally socio-economic development and biodiversity conservation.

KEYWORDS: WTO, environmental sustainability, socio-economic factors.

Tourism has shown a sustained and resilient growth over the last 50 years. According to the World Tourism Organization forecasts, this sector will pursue its growth and, every year, more people will be in motion than ever before.

There is now recognition that uncontrolled growth in tourism aiming at short-term benefits often results in negative impacts, harming the environment and destroying the very basis on which tourism is built and thrives. On the contrary, when tourism is planned, developed and managed using sustainable criteria, its benefits can spread through society and the natural environment.

This fact is now widely recognised and, as a part of this recognition, the interrelations between biodiversity conservation and sustainable development of tourism are reflected in various major documents such as:
- The Plan of implementation of the World Summit on Sustainable Development (2002) that contains a whole article on sustainable tourism (43) and an article on biodiversity (44) referring to “sustainable tourism, as a cross-cutting issue relevant to different ecosystems, sectors and thematic areas”.
- The Québec Declaration on Ecotourism (2002)
- The CBD Guidelines on Biodiversity and Tourism Development (2003)
- The special recommendations of the V World Park Congress (2003): “Tourism as a Vehicle for Conservation and Support of Protected Areas”

Besides these relevant principles and guidelines, many tools and techniques exist that allow tourism developers to increase, among others, environmental sustainability in the sector, among which: Zoning, ecolabels and other certification schemes, environmental indicators, water and waste management in tourist establishments, congestion management at tourism sites, etc.

The World Tourism Organization has conducted studies and published many works aiming at raising awareness among all tourism stakeholders (public and private). WTO activities and publications in this field can be found under the following link:
http://www.world-tourism.org/sustainable

The Organization also encourages local authorities, NGOs and universities to conduct research on the actual impacts of tourism activities upon ecosystems, biodiversity, as well as upon local and indigenous cultures and the socio-economic fabric of the tourism destinations. Indeed, it has to be clearly understood that no action aiming at reducing the impacts on the environmental sphere can be dissociated from the two other dimensions of the sustainable development, which are the social and the economic ones.