Re-calling [forth] sustainable tourism, II


(#GreenShift #2)


A second piece to recall how sustainable tourism evolved. The first one is here, https://sustainableexperience.blogspot.com/2020/07/re-calling-forth-sustainable-tourism.html and I am writing this because it is my firm belief that remembering is understanding.
In 2004, the World Tourism Organization (WTO) specified that achieving fully sustainable tourism is a continuous process, and requires constant monitoring of the impacts, the persistent implementation of corrective measures and preventive measures. Sustainable tourism won’t ever be a zero impact actvity. Zero impact in human activities is rare, and for a huge industry like tourism is a make-believe.
Still, the assessment of the WTO comes after a gestation of decades, and definitely is not rootless.

In 1987, the World Commission on Environment and Development, also named after its president the Bruntland Commission, published the report "Our Common Future". The report was largely later embedded in the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, in 1992 and the in third UN Conference on Environment and Development in Johannesburg, in 2002. Its contribution to make sustainability definable remains a cornerstone today. The idea of sustainability increasingly took shape as a form of development that makes possible to meet today's needs without compromising their satisfaction for the future generations.

In 1995 the World Travel and Tourism Council (official website https://wttc.org/, and current updates about the COVID crisis here https://wttc.org/COVID-19), a body that gathers a hundred of the largest planetary tourism companies, joined forces with the WTO and the Earth Council (https://earthcouncilalliance.org/ ). From this union stemmed the answer to the challenges launched by the Rio Declaration of 1992. The product of the collaboration is the Agenda 21 for the Travel and Tourism Industry, meant to be a significant step towards a sustainable development of the tourist sector.

Since the days of these first meaningful steps, the toolbox for the assessment, the monitoring and the rating of sustainable tourism has been enriched by local, regional, macro-regional and global experience. 
Just to quote a couple of examples from where I am writing, the Italian Bandiera Lilla, a municipality-based program for a more inclusive tourism, tailored for unpaired/disable tourists; Or the Blue Flag system for classifying beaches in Europe.
At a more than macro-regional level, the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP)assists tour operators through the Tour Operators Initiative with the purpose to achieve the creation of a fully sustainable tourism chain. The International Standard Organization (ISO) has developed a standard for an environmental management system for companies, ISO 14001.

The core of all these different programs, projects, bodies is to consolidate a culture of development that ensures that today's benefits are persistent over time. The perspective is reversed to the logic of maximum exploitation of the present resources regardless of their depletion and possible disappearance. Such an approach has limited time horizon as it does not include considerations for the medium and long terms.
There will be the chance in future to share some more in-depth reflections about time, time horizons. Just a quick bite here: extending the time, and extending the time horizon is the same principle which triggered the birth of the Slow Food Movement as a reaction to the fast food culture. Slow food is now a vibrating reality and a major force in the sustainability camp and in the tourism sector of many destinations in Italy and elsewhere (https://www.slowfood.com/) 

In sustainability the effort is to strike a balance among different priorities: people's rights to a decent and safe life, the protection, preservation and promotion of the eco-system and bio-diversity, in a way that all human, animal, environmental, economic, social, cultural and aesthetic resources must be guaranteed with integrity, safety and regeneration processes.
A task, perhaps I’d better say a mission, as challenging, as reinvigorating ֎

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